Saturday, June 6, 2009

37

adopted by Brighton activists is given up when they give up and
get on with their career.

In the fuel protests of 2000 the left and the greens forgot about 'the
police state' and eagerly called for a clampdown on
fascist/polluting lorry drivers who were "undemocratically holding
us all ransom". And during war there are an embarrassing many
who lose their cynical attitude and find a reason to become
patriotic. Which is the worse spectacle, leftwingers berating the
working class for their lack of enthusiasm for leftwing politics or
leftwingers berating the working class for their lack of enthusiasm
for war? The most repulsive attribute of the left is that first they
have to blah blah blah about how radical they are and then they
have to blah blah blah about their conversion to the the right. They
never shut up. It is possible to perceive a common driving force in
apparent adversaries: behind the rhetoric of political left
and right is the orchestrating interest of the owning class. So,
when we talk about consciousness and, in response, others look
for quotes in the collected works of Lenin, we seem them as being in
retreat, both refusing to engage with our ideas and refusing to
engage with the failure to achieve the purpose of their groups. We
see in the retreat to Lenin a revelation of many authoritarian
characteristics in small group life, the dominant motive of which is
a search for a means to shut us up. This is one source of our anti-
consciousness position: consciousness, and the owners of
consciousness, cannot be trusted because, quite rightly, under
pressure 'beliefs' will be dropped in favor of underlying class
interest. Middle class radicals will always revert to class affiliation,
no matter the political content of their values. The reality of the
world is that of defending the class-interests created by capitalism,
the only way to get beyond 'interests' is the collapse of its
determining frame.

Every 15 year old pro-revolutionary is disgusted by the figure of
Lenin, only later do they learn 'realpolitik' and swallowing their bile,
assert in the face of their own political defeats and
disappointments, 'at least he was right', he was right because he
won: and it is this achieved power, this victory, that excites
admiration. The seizure of state power seems real enough; real in
the sense that it appears to escape the determination of events by

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