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precisely because of their purity, could at certain moments
achieve spectacular results -- if they judged their interventions
correctly.

How many of you are there?

A few more than the original guerrilla nucleus in the Sierra Madre,
but with fewer weapons. A few less than the delegates in London
in 1864 who founded the International Workingman's Association,
but with a more coherent program. As unyielding as the Greeks at
Thermopylae ("Passerby, go tell them at Lacedaemon..."), but with
a brighter future.
SI Questionnaire

Revolutionary groups, in the absence of the realization of the unity
of theory and practice, sought to establish the reality of truth in two
places at once: in their heads and in the objectively
constituted but autonomous working class engagement with the
economy. But the contemplative role of the revolutionary cell soon
became restrictive, and so to compensate for this, or at least to
address this discomfort , the groups sought out means, events,
modes, ideologies, whereby they could justify their appearance on
the stage as actors. It is important that the move towards action
and its justification was begun in response to initial passivity, that
is, direct political engagement was begun from a predication of
subjective, ideological factors; for the revolutionary groups
becoming fidgety it soon became morally insupportable that they
should 'sit by' whilst momentous events were unfolding, that they
should 'sit around theorizing', when they ought to be 'out there
showing solidarity and getting ideas across'. But what can ten
of twelve declasse individuals 'do'? Make situations of course. It
is at the juncture where the individual or small group seeks to
make itself significant to the world that leftist ideology becomes
less concerned with inconceivable masses and more focused on
conceptions of the self. From S. o. B.'s initial transformation of the
formula for social division from owner/worker to
ordergiver/ordertaker, a sudden rush of new theories of polarity
went in and our of the leftbank fashion: authentic/inauthentic, tuned
in/straight, spectator/actant. Existentialism, Marcuse and the
mythic heroes of popular culture (Dean, Presley, Brandon, and later
Guevara) also contributed to the legitimization of pursuing the