Saturday, June 6, 2009

39

other hand were very appropriate for the moment, being
affirmational, they belong to falsity.

What is the motive for the return to Lenin? It is a noted historical
phenomenon that religions are revitalized, become fundamentalist,
immediately preceding their abandonment: there is always one last
great bonfire, cathedral build, sacrifice of innocents, before
indifference. Groups and ideas decay always along the same lines
because they always encounter the same boundaries to their
effectiveness. The typical pro-revolutionary response to this
frustration is to bring in an element from the outside which is
intended to trump the impasse of present conditions but serves
only to suppress the function of the group. A better response
would be a clear eyed evaluation of failure and the limits of group
effectiveness, at that point you will find the end of the expediency
of consciousness. We see the return to Lenin in people's
responses to us as, on the one hand, an affirmation of the need for
a 'revolutionary movement' independent of the working class with
the Bolsheviks as the model (because they were the winners, they
are our example - there are some people who have tried to shut us
up, or expel us from debate, who perhaps are our own little
contemporary Lenin's. Bless them), and on the other hand it
seems to 'revitalize', previously subdued, Trotskyist (Leninist)
roots. More vaguely, but influencing every move the internet
discussion forum of communist where we have had much of this
debate, there is a Leninist urge to get to a stage of defined
position; the idea of the final word and supra-historical principle are
the great temptation. If we have not numbers then at least we can
have truth?

MD think not. Truth is always in numbers - curse the working class
- all they do is drop their guns, go home and start ploughing the
landlord's land again, damn them, it's so easy for them, and here
we are, revolutionary heroes, brooding on our non-connection.
The defeat of the revolutionary working class, their enclosure and
extermination is the truth of the Russian Revolution, and not Lenin
at all: why didn't they leave any writing that we could go back to
when we are presented with our own defeat?

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