Saturday, June 6, 2009

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to engage with the 'why' this movement has not got off the
ground since 1939; they want to go back to a time when such
movements were possible because political revolutions are the
only revolutions that they can conceive.

We shall put this simply: there is no revolutionary movement.
There was a revolutionary movement but it collapsed because it
turned out not to be a revolutionary movement at all but an
ideological mystification of social and economic relations and
processes (ie., a political interpretation of capitalist social
mechanisms which saw itself as the mystified solution to the
mystified problem); it is possible that there will be, in the near
future, a revolutionary movement of the kind some hope for but it
will not really be revolutionary even though, or especially because,
it says it is.

We view revolutionary and anti-capitalist movement not as
mistaken forms of otherwise correct positions but as capitalist
movements in themselves; revolutionary movements effect only
the reorganization of capitalism and as such, at the end of their
acts, words are breath, are pro-capitalist. To be a Leninist is to be
as much a capitalist as a Keynesian, Trotsky was as capitalist as any
other liberal reformer. There are different forms and interpretations
but theoretical maintenance of the working class as workers
(whether for state owners or green collectives) and the emphasis
on the re-organization of production (whether in terms of
nationalism or with reference to the environment) means they
are always within the capitalist frame of definition.

Do these 'revolutionary experts' with their vague appeals to
'consciousness' think that nobody else has tried to build exactly
what they desire to build? They want to go back to Lenin but there
have been thousands of revolutionary groups, parties and
individuals in the eight decades since 1917, all of which failed. Do
they think their personal ardour is enough to bring billions into line?
These billions have not come for Lenin, or any other 'socialism' for
fifty years and nor will they. There is nothing any of us can do to
bring them to consciousness. Some of us, beginning with MD, do
not even wish for the 'movement', that means to an end which

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