Equal right to all the goods
and pleasures of this world, the destruction of all authority,
the negation of all moral restraints in the final
analysis, these are the aims behind the March 18th insurrection
and the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished
it with an army.
Parliamentary
Inquest on the Paris Commune
73
The real movement that transforms existing conditions
has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisies
victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance
became visible once that victory was translated onto the
political plane. The development of productive forces
shattered the old production relations, and all static
order crumbled. Everything that was absolute became historical.
74
When people are thrust into history and forced to participate
in the work and struggles that constitute history, they
find themselves obliged to view their relationships in
a clear and disabused manner. This history has no object
distinct from what it creates from out of itself, although
the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical
era considered the productive progression through which
history had unfolded as itself the object of history.
As for the subject of history, it can be nothing
other than the self-production of the living living
people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical
world and of their own fully conscious adventures.
75
The class struggles of the long era of revolutions
initiated by the rise of the bourgeoisie have developed
in tandem with the dialectical thought of history”
— the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning
of what exists, but which strives to comprehend the dissolution
of what exists, and in the process breaks down every separation.
76
For Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world,
but to interpret the transformation of the world.
But because he limited himself to merely interpreting
that transformation, Hegel only represents the philosophical
culmination of philosophy. He seeks to understand a world
that develops by itself. This historical thought
is still a consciousness that always arrives too late,
a consciousness that can only formulate retrospective
justifications of what has already happened. It has thus
gone beyond separation only in thought. Hegels
paradoxical stance his subordination of the meaning
of all reality to its historical culmination while at
the same time proclaiming that his own system represents
that culmination flows from the simple fact that
this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries sought in his philosophy only
a reconciliation with the results of those revolutions.
Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution,
it does not express the entire process of this revolution,
but only its concluding phase. In this sense it is a philosophy
not of the revolution, but of the restoration (Karl
Korsch, Theses on Hegel and Revolution). Hegel
performed the task of the philosopher the
glorification of what exists for the last
time; but already what existed for him could be nothing
less than the entire movement of history. Since he nevertheless
maintained the external position of thought,
this externality could be masked only by identifying that
thought with a preexisting project of the Spirit
of that absolute heroic force which has done what it willed
and willed what it has done, and whose ultimate goal coincides
with the present. Philosophy, in the process of being
superseded by historical thought, has thus arrived at
the point where it can glorify its world only by denying
it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the
total history to which it has relegated everything has
already come to an end, and that the only tribunal where
truth could be judged is closed.
77
When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions
that this historical thought has not been forgotten, its
refutation of that thoughts conclusion
is at the same time a confirmation of its method.
Historical thought can be salvaged only by becoming practical
thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary
class can be nothing less than historical consciousness
operating on the totality of its world. All the theoretical
currents of the revolutionary working-class movement
Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx grew
out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.
79
The inseparability of Marxs theory from the Hegelian
method is itself inseparable from that theorys revolutionary
character, that is, from its truth. It is in this regard
that the relationship between Marx and Hegel has generally
been ignored or misunderstood, or even denounced as the
weak point of what became fallaciously transformed into
a doctrine: Marxism. Bernstein implicitly
revealed this connection between the dialectical method
and historical partisanship when in his book
Evolutionary Socialism he deplored the 1847 Manifestos
unscientific predictions of imminent proletarian revolution
in Germany: This historical self-deception, so erroneous
that the most naďve political visionary could hardly have
done any worse, would be incomprehensible in a Marx who
at that time had already seriously studied economics if
we did not recognize that it reflected the lingering influence
of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic, from which Marx,
like Engels, could never completely free himself. In those
times of general effervescence this influence was all
the more fatal to him.
80
The inversion carried out by Marx in order to salvage
the thought of the bourgeois revolutions by transferring
it to a different context does not trivially consist of
putting the materialist development of productive forces
in place of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward
its eventual encounter with itself the Spirit whose
objectification is identical to its alienation and whose
historical wounds leave no scars. For once history becomes
real, it no longer has an end. Marx demolished
Hegels position of detachment from events,
as well as passive contemplation by any supreme
external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theorys concern
is simply to know what it itself is doing. In contrast,
present-day societys passive contemplation of the
movement of the economy is an untranscended holdover
from the undialectical aspect of Hegels
attempt to create a circular system; it is an approval
that is no longer on the conceptual level and that no
longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself, because
the movement it now praises is a sector of a world where
thought no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical
development effectively dominates everything. Marxs
project is a project of conscious history, in which the
quantitativeness that arises out of the blind development
of merely economic productive forces must be transformed
into a qualitative appropriation of history. The critique
of political economy is the first act of this end
of prehistory: Of all the instruments of production,
the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class
itself.
81
Marxs theory is closely linked with scientific
thought insofar as it seeks a rational understanding of
the forces that really operate in society. But it ultimately
goes beyond scientific thought, preserving it
only by superseding it. It seeks to understand social
struggles, not sociological laws. We
recognize only one science: the science of history
(The German Ideology).
82
The bourgeois era, which wants to give history a scientific
foundation, overlooks the fact that the science available
to it could itself arise only on the foundation of the
historical development of the economy. But history is
fundamentally dependent on this economic knowledge only
so long as it remains merely economic history.
The extent to which the viewpoint of scientific observation
could overlook historys effect on the economy (an
overall process modifying its own scientific premises)
is shown by the vanity of those socialists who thought
they had calculated the exact periodicity of economic
crises. Now that constant government intervention has
succeeded in counteracting the tendencies toward crisis,
the same type of mentality sees this delicate balance
as a definitive economic harmony. The project of transcending
the economy and mastering history must grasp and incorporate
the science of society, but it cannot itself be a scientific
project. The revolutionary movement remains bourgeois
insofar as it thinks it can master current history by
means of scientific knowledge.
83
The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically
grounded in criticism of the existing social system, can
rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore history
(that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking
place and any passage of time outside the immutable perfection
of their image of a happy society), but not because they
reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers
were completely dominated by the scientific thought of
earlier centuries. They sought the completion and fulfillment
of that general rational system. They did not consider
themselves unarmed prophets, for they firmly believed
in the social power of scientific proof and even, in the
case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science.
Why, Sombart asked, would they want
to seize through struggle what merely needed to be proved?
But the utopians scientific understanding did not
include the awareness that some social groups have vested
interests in maintaining the status quo, forces to maintain
it, and forms of false consciousness to reinforce it.
Their grasp of reality thus lagged far behind the historical
reality of the development of science itself, which had
been largely oriented by the social requirements
arising from such factors, which determined not only what
findings were considered acceptable, but even what might
or might not become an object of scientific research.
The utopian socialists remained prisoners of the scientific
manner of expounding the truth, viewing this truth
as a pure abstract image the form in which it had
established itself at a much earlier stage of social development.
As Sorel noted, the utopians took astronomy as
their model for discovering and demonstrating the laws
of society; their unhistorical conception of harmony was
the natural result of their attempt to apply to society
the science least dependent on history. They described
this harmony as if they were Newtons discovering universal
scientific laws, and the happy ending they constantly
evoked plays a role in their social science analogous
to the role of inertia in classical physics (Materials
for a Theory of the Proletariat).
84
The scientific-determinist aspect of Marxs thought
was precisely what made it vulnerable to ideologization,
both during his own lifetime and even more so in the theoretical
heritage he left to the workers movement. The advent of
the historical subject continues to be postponed, and
it is economics, the historical science par excellence,
which is increasingly seen as guaranteeing the inevitability
of its own future negation. In this way revolutionary
practice, the only true agent of this negation, tends
to be pushed out of theorys field of vision. Instead,
it is seen as essential to patiently study economic development,
and to go back to accepting the suffering which that development
imposes with a Hegelian tranquility. The result remains
“a graveyard of good intentions.” The science of
revolutions” then concludes that consciousness always
comes too soon, and has to be taught. History
has shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were
wrong, Engels wrote in 1895. It has made clear
that the state of economic development on the Continent
at that time was far from being ripe. Throughout
his life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in
his theory, but the exposition of his theory
was carried out on the terrain of the dominant
thought insofar as it took the form of critiques of particular
disciplines, most notably the critique of that fundamental
science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was
in this mutilated form, which eventually came to be seen
as orthodox, that Marxs theory was transformed into
Marxism.
85
The weakness of Marxs theory is naturally linked
to the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat
of his time. The German working class failed to inaugurate
a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune was
defeated in isolation. As a result, revolutionary theory
could not yet be fully realized. The fact that Marx was
reduced to defending and refining it by cloistered scholarly
work in the British Museum had a debilitating effect on
the theory itself. His scientific conclusions about the
future development of the working class, and the organizational
practice apparently implied by those conclusions, became
obstacles to proletarian consciousness at a later stage.
86
The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific
defense of proletarian revolution (both in its content
and in its form of exposition) all ultimately result from
identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with
respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.
87
As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marxs
effort to demonstrate the legitimacy of proletarian power
by citing a repetitive sequence of precedents
led him to oversimplify his historical analysis into a
linear model of the development of modes of production,
in which class struggles invariably resulted either
in a revolutionary transformation of the entire society
or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.
The plain facts of history, however, are that the Asiatic
mode of production (as Marx himself acknowledged
elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class
conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal
lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient
world ended the rule of the freemen. The linear schema
loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the
only revolutionary class that has ever won; and that
it is also the only class for which the development of
the economy was both the cause and the consequence of
its taking control of society. The same oversimplification
led Marx to neglect the economic role of the state in
the management of class society. If the rising bourgeoisie
seemed to liberate the economy from the state, this was
true only to the extent that the previous state was an
instrument of class oppression within a static economy.
The bourgeoisie originally developed its independent economic
power during the medieval period when the state had been
weakened and feudalism was breaking up the stable equilibrium
between different powers. In contrast, the modern state
— which began to support the bourgeoisies development
through its mercantile policies and which developed into
the bourgeoisies own state during the laissez-faire
era — was eventually to emerge as a central power in the
planned management of the economic process. Marx
was nevertheless able to describe the Bonapartist
prototype of modern statist bureaucracy, the fusion of
capital and state to create a national power of
capital over labor, a public force designed to maintain
social servitude a form of social order in
which the bourgeoisie renounces all historical life apart
from what has been reduced to the economic history of
things, and would like to be condemned
to the same political nothingness as all the other classes.
The sociopolitical foundations of the modern spectacle
are already discernable here, and these foundations negatively
imply that the proletariat is the only pretender to
historical life.
88
The only two classes that really correspond to Marxs
theory, the two pure classes that the entire analysis
of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary
classes in history, but operating under very different
conditions. The bourgeois revolution is done. The proletarian
revolution is a yet-unrealized project, born on the foundation
of the earlier revolution but differing from it qualitatively.
If one overlooks the originality of the historical
role of the bourgeoisie, one also tends to overlook the
specific originality of the proletarian project, which
can achieve nothing unless it carries its own banners
and recognizes the immensity of its own tasks.
The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class
of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot create
its own new form of power except by becoming the class
of consciousness. The growth of productive forces
will not in itself guarantee the emergence of such a power
not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession
which that growth entails. Nor can a Jacobin-style seizure
of the state be a means to this end. The proletariat cannot
make use of any ideology designed to disguise
its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat
cannot preserve any partial reality that is truly its
own.
89
If Marx, during a certain period of his participation
in the proletarian struggle, placed too great a reliance
on scientific prediction, to the point of creating the
intellectual basis for the illusions of economism, it
is clear that he himself did not succumb to those illusions.
In a well-known letter of 7 December 1867, accompanying
an article criticizing Capital which he himself
had written but which he wanted Engels to present to the
press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly indicated
the limits of his own science: The authors
subjective tendency (imposed on him, perhaps,
by his political position and his past), namely the manner
in which he views and presents the final outcome of the
present movement and social process, has no connection
with his actual analysis. By thus disparaging the
tendentious conclusions of his own objective
analysis, and by the irony of the perhaps
with reference to the extrascientific choices supposedly
imposed on him, Marx implicitly revealed the
methodological key to fusing the two aspects.
90
The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within
the historical struggle itself, in such a way that each
depends on the other for its validation. The proletarian
class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing
revolutionary struggles and in its reorganization of society
at the moment of revolution this is where
the practical conditions of consciousness must
exist, conditions in which the theory of praxis is confirmed
by becoming practical theory. But this crucial question
of organization was virtually ignored by revolutionary
theory during the period when the workers movement was
first taking shape — the very period when that theory
still possessed the unitary character it had
inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly
vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice).
Instead, the organizational question became the weakest
aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself
to the revival of hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed
from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization
of the workers movement that were developed on the basis
of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit
the maintenance of a unitary theory by breaking it up
into various specialized and fragmented disciplines. This
ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able
to recognize the practical verifications of the unitary
historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications
emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles; instead,
it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and
memory of them. Yet those historical forms that took shape
in struggle were precisely the practical terrain that
was needed in order to validate the theory. They were
what the theory needed, yet that need had not been formulated
theoretically. The soviet, for example, was not
a theoretical discovery. And the most advanced theoretical
truth of the International Workingmens Association
was its own existence in practice.
The First Internationals initial successes enabled
it to free itself from the confused influences of the
dominant ideology that had survived within it. But the
defeat and repression that it soon encountered brought
to the surface a conflict between two different conceptions
of proletarian revolution, each of which contained an
authoritarian aspect that amounted to abandoning
the conscious self-emancipation of the working class.
The feud between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, which
eventually became irreconcilable, actually centered on
two different issues — the question of power in a future
revolutionary society and the question of the organization
of the current movement — and each of the adversaries
reversed their position when they went from one aspect
to the other. Bakunin denounced the illusion that classes
could be abolished by means of an authoritarian implementation
of state power, warning that this would lead to the formation
of a new bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship
of the most knowledgeable (or of those reputed to be such).
Marx, who believed that the concomitant maturation of
economic contradictions and of the workers education
in democracy would reduce the role of a proletarian state
to a brief phase needed to legitimize the new social relations
brought into being by objective factors, denounced Bakunin
and his supporters as an authoritarian conspiratorial
elite who were deliberately placing themselves above the
International with the harebrained scheme of imposing
on society an irresponsible dictatorship of the most revolutionary
(or of those who would designate themselves as such).
Bakunin did in fact recruit followers on such a basis:
In the midst of the popular tempest we must be the
invisible pilots guiding the revolution, not through any
kind of overt power but through the collective dictatorship
of our Alliance a dictatorship without any badges
or titles or official status, yet all the more powerful
because it will have none of the appearances of power.
Thus two ideologies of working-class revolution
opposed each other, each containing a partially true critique,
but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting
itself up as an ideological authority. Powerful
organizations such as German Social Democracy and the
Iberian Anarchist Federation faithfully served one or
the other of these ideologies; and everywhere the result
was very different from what had been sought.
The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian
revolution as immediately present represents
both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist
struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken
seriously the pretensions of the individualist
forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the
historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist
anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its constant
harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate
indifference to any consideration of methods. Its critique
of political struggle has thus remained abstract,
while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled
toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly
be achieved by a single blow on this terrain, on the day
of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists
have saddled themselves with fulfilling an ideal.
Anarchism remains a merely ideological negation
of the state and of class society the very social
conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies.
It is the ideology of pure freedom, an ideology
that puts everything on the same level and loses any conception
of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within
history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single
all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit
of representing the rejection of existing conditions in
the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint
of some particular critical specialization; but the fact
that this fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute,
in accordance with individual whim and in advance of any
practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all
too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular
struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and
all-embracing lesson, because this lesson has from the
beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of the
movement. This is reflected in Bakunins 1873 letter
of resignation from the Jura Federation: During
the past nine years the International has developed more
than enough ideas to save the world, if ideas alone could
save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a new
one. Its no longer the time for ideas, its
time for actions. This perspective undoubtedly retains
proletarian historical thoughts recognition that
ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical
terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this
transition to practice have already been discovered and
will never change.
93
The anarchists, who explicitly distinguish themselves
from the rest of the workers movement by their ideological
conviction, reproduce this separation of competencies
within their own ranks by providing a terrain that facilitates
the informal domination of each particular anarchist organization
by propagandists and defenders of their ideology, specialists
whose mediocre intellectual activity is largely limited
to the constant regurgitation of a few eternal truths.
The anarchists ideological reverence for unanimous
decisionmaking has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled
manipulation of their own organizations by specialists
in freedom; and revolutionary anarchism expects
the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means,
from the masses once they have been liberated. Furthermore,
the anarchists refusal to take into account the
great differences between the conditions of a minority
banded together in present-day struggles and of a postrevolutionary
society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the
isolation of anarchists when the moment for collective
decisionmaking actually arrives, as is shown by the countless
anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and
crushed at a local level.
94
The illusion more or less explicitly maintained by genuine
anarchism is its constant belief that a revolution is
just around the corner, and that the instantaneous accomplishment
of this revolution will demonstrate the truth of anarchist
ideology and of the form of practical organization that
has developed in accordance with that ideology. In 1936
anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a revolution
that was the most advanced expression of proletarian power
ever realized. But even in that case it should be noted
that the general uprising began as a merely defensive
reaction to the armys attempted coup. Furthermore,
inasmuch as the revolution was not carried to completion
during its opening days (because Franco controlled half
the country and was being strongly supported from abroad,
because the rest of the international proletarian movement
had already been defeated, and because the anti-Franco
camp included various bourgeois forces and statist working-class
parties), the organized anarchist movement proved incapable
of extending the revolutions partial victories,
or even of defending them. Its recognized leaders became
government ministers, hostages to a bourgeois state that
was destroying the revolution even as it proceeded to
lose the civil war.
The orthodox Marxism of the Second International
is the scientific ideology of socialist revolution, an
ideology which identifies its whole truth with objective
economic processes and with the progressive recognition
of the inevitability of those processes by a working class
educated by the organization. This ideology revives the
faith in pedagogical demonstration that was found among
the utopian socialists, combining that faith with a contemplative
invocation of the course of history; but it has lost both
the Hegelian dimension of total history and the static
image of totality presented by the utopians (most richly
by Fourier). This type of scientific attitude, which can
do nothing more than resurrect the traditional dilemmas
between symmetrical ethical choices, is at the root of
Hilferdings absurd conclusion that recognizing the
inevitability of socialism gives no indication as
to what practical attitude should be adopted. For it is
one thing to recognize that something is inevitable, and
quite another to put oneself in the service of that inevitability
(Finanzkapital). Those who failed to realize
that for Marx and for the revolutionary proletariat unitary
historical thought was in no way distinct from a practical
attitude to be adopted generally ended up becoming
victims of the practice they did adopt.
96
The ideology of the social-democratic organizations put
those organizations under the control of the professors
who were educating the working class, and their organizational
forms corresponded to this type of passive apprenticeship.
The participation of the socialists of the Second International
in political and economic struggles was admittedly concrete,
but it was profoundly uncritical. It was a manifestly
reformist practice carried on in the name of
an illusory revolutionism. This ideology of revolution
inevitably foundered on the very successes of those who
proclaimed it. The elevation of socialist journalists
and parliamentary representatives above the rest of the
movement encouraged them to become habituated to a bourgeois
lifestyle (most of them had in any case been recruited
from the bourgeois intelligentsia). And even industrial
workers who had been recruited out of struggles in the
factories were transformed by the trade-union bureaucracy
into brokers of labor-power, whose task was to make sure
that that commodity was sold at a fair price.
For the activity of all these people to have retained
any appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism would
have had to have turned out to be conveniently incapable
of tolerating this economic reformism, despite the fact
that it had no trouble tolerating the legalistic political
expressions of the same reformism. The social democrats
scientific ideology confidently affirmed that capitalism
could not tolerate these economic antagonisms;
but history repeatedly proved them wrong.
97
Bernstein, the social democrat least attached to political
ideology and most openly attached to the methodology of
bourgeois science, was honest enough to point out this
contradiction (a contradiction which had also been implied
by the reformist movement of the English workers, who
never bothered to invoke any revolutionary ideology).
But it was historical development itself which ultimately
provided the definitive demonstration. Although full of
illusions in other regards, Bernstein had denied that
a crisis of capitalist production would miraculously force
the hand of the socialists, who wanted to inherit the
revolution only by way of this orthodox sequence of events.
The profound social upheaval touched off by World War
I, though it led to a widespread awakening of radical
consciousness, twice demonstrated that the social-democratic
hierarchy had failed to provide the German workers with
a revolutionary education capable of turning them
into theorists: first, when the overwhelming majority
of the party rallied to the imperialist war; then, following
the German defeat, when the party crushed the Spartakist
revolutionaries. The ex-worker Ebert, who had become one
of the social-democratic leaders, apparently still believed
in sin since he admitted that he hated revolution like
sin. And he proved himself a fitting precursor of
the socialist representation that was soon to
emerge as the mortal enemy of the proletariat in Russia
and elsewhere, when he accurately summed up the essence
of this new form of alienation: Socialism means
working a lot.
As a Marxist thinker, Lenin was simply a faithful and
consistent Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary
ideology of orthodox Marxism within the
conditions existing in Russia, conditions which did not
lend themselves to the reformist practice carried on elsewhere
by the Second International. In the Russian context, the
Bolshevik practice of directing the proletariat from outside,
by means of a disciplined underground party under the
control of intellectuals who had become professional
revolutionaries, became a new profession
a profession which refused to come to terms with any of
the professional ruling strata of capitalist society (the
Czarist political regime was in any case incapable of
offering any opportunities for such compromise, which
depends on an advanced stage of bourgeois power). As a
result of this intransigence, the Bolsheviks ended up
becoming the sole practitioners of the profession
of totalitarian social domination.
99
With the war and the collapse of international social
democracy in the face of that war, the authoritarian ideological
radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able to spread its influence
all over the world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions
of the workers movement transformed the entire world into
a Russia, and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary
breakthrough engendered by this period of crisis, offered
its hierarchical and ideological model to the proletariat
of all countries, urging them to adopt it in order to
speak Russian to their own ruling classes.
Lenin did not reproach the Marxism of the Second International
for being a revolutionary ideology, but for ceasing
to be a revolutionary ideology.
100
The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for
itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously
for the old world marks the inauguration of the
state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacles
domination: the representation of the working class
has become an enemy of the working class.
101
In all previous revolutions, wrote Rosa Luxemburg
in Die Rote Fahne of 21 December 1918, the
combatants faced each other openly and directly — class
against class, program against program. In the present
revolution, the troops protecting the old order are not
fighting under the insignia of the ruling class, but under
the banner of a social-democratic party. If
the central question of revolution was posed openly and
honestly Capitalism or socialism? the great
mass of the proletariat would today have no doubts or
hesitations. Thus, a few days before its destruction,
the radical current of the German proletariat discovered
the secret of the new conditions engendered by the whole
process that had gone before (a development to which the
representation of the working class had greatly contributed):
the spectacular organization of the ruling orders
defense, the social reign of appearances where no central
question can any longer be posed openly and
honestly. The revolutionary representation of the
proletariat had at this stage become both the primary
cause and the central result of the general falsification
of society.
102
The organization of the proletariat in accordance with
the Bolshevik model resulted from the backwardness of
Russia and from the abandonment of revolutionary struggle
by the workers movements of the advanced countries. These
same backward conditions also tended to foster the counterrevolutionary
aspects which that form of organization had unconsciously
contained from its inception. The repeated failure of
the mass of the European workers movement to take advantage
of the golden opportunities of the 1918-1920 period (a
failure which included the violent destruction of its
own radical minority) favored the consolidation of the
Bolshevik development and enabled that fraudulent outcome
to present itself to the world as the only possible proletarian
solution. By seizing a state monopoly as sole representative
and defender of working-class power, the Bolshevik Party
justified itself and became what it already was:
the party of the owners of the proletariat, owners
who essentially eliminated earlier forms of property.
103
For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social
democracy had engaged in an unresolved debate over all
the conditions that might bear on the overthrow of Czarism
the weakness of the bourgeoisie; the preponderance
of the peasant majority; and the potentially decisive
role of a proletariat which was concentrated and combative
but which constituted only a small minority of the population.
This debate was eventually resolved in practice by a factor
that had not figured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary
bureaucracy that placed itself at the head of the proletariat,
seized state power and proceeded to impose a new form
of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution had
been impossible; talk of a democratic dictatorship
of workers and peasants was meaningless verbiage;
and the proletarian power of the soviets could not simultaneously
maintain itself against the class of small landowners,
against the national and international White reaction,
and against its own representation which had become externalized
and alienated in the form of a working-class party that
maintained total control over the state, the economy,
the means of expression, and soon even over peoples
thoughts. Trotsky’s and Parvuss theory of permanent
revolution, which Lenin adopted in April 1917, was the
only theory that proved true for countries with underdeveloped
bourgeoisies; but it became true only after the unknown
factor of bureaucratic class power came into the picture.
In the numerous arguments within the Bolshevik leadership,
Lenin was the most consistent advocate of concentrating
dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological
representation. Lenin was right every time in the sense
that he invariably supported the solution implied by earlier
choices of the minority that now exercised absolute power:
the democracy that was kept from peasants by means of
the state would have to be kept from workers
as well, which led to denying it to Communist union leaders
and to party members in general, and finally to the highest
ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth Congress, as
the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried
under a barrage of slander, Lenin attacked the radical-left
bureaucrats who had formed a Workers Opposition
faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which
Stalin would later extend to an absolute division of the
world: You can stand here with us, or against us
out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some
opposition. . . . Weve had enough opposition.
104
After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy consolidated its power
as sole owner of a system of state capitalism
internally by means of a temporary alliance with
the peasantry (the New Economic Policy) and
externally by using the workers regimented into the bureaucratic
parties of the Third International as a backup force for
Russian diplomacy, sabotaging the entire revolutionary
movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose support
it in turn hoped to secure in the sphere of international
politics (the Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925-27,
the Popular Fronts in Spain and France, etc.). The Russian
bureaucracy then carried this consolidation of power to
the next stage by subjecting the peasantry to a reign
of terror, implementing the most brutal primitive accumulation
of capital in history. The industrialization of the Stalin
era revealed the bureaucracys ultimate function:
continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the
essence of market society: commodified labor. It also
demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy
has come to dominate society so completely that it has
proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs
for its own continued operation; that is, the bourgeoisie
has created an independent power that is capable of maintaining
itself even without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy
was not the last owning class in history in
Bruno Rizzis sense; it was merely a substitute
ruling class for the commodity economy. An impotent
capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder version
of itself simplified, less diversified, and concentrated
as the collective property of the bureaucratic class.
This underdeveloped type of ruling class is also a reflection
of economic underdevelopment, and it has no agenda beyond
overcoming this underdevelopment in certain regions of
the world. The hierarchical and statist framework for
this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided
by the working-class party, which was itself modeled on
the hierarchical separations of bourgeois organizations.
As Ante Ciliga noted while in one of Stalins prisons,
Technical questions of organization turned out to
be social questions (Lenin and the Revolution).
Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of
revolutionary ideology — a coherence of the separate
governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent
of Stalinism, revolutionary ideology returned to its
fundamental incoherence. At that point, ideology
was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself.
But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.
The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates
reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it
says exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle
has been confined to certain underdeveloped regions, it
has nevertheless played an essential role in the spectacles
global development. This particular materialization of
ideology did not transform the world economically, as
did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state methods
to transform peoples perception of the
world.
106
The ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler
of a world turned upside down. The more powerful the class,
the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed
above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on
this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent
bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements
of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its
existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must
be invisible as a class. As a result, all social
life becomes insane. The social organization of total
falsehood stems from this fundamental contradiction.
107
Stalinism was also a reign of terror within
the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this classs
power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself,
because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally
recognized status as an owning class which could be extended
to each of its members. Its ownership has to be masked
because it is based on false consciousness. This false
consciousness can maintain its total power only by means
of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are
ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic
class have the right of ownership over society only collectively,
as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to play
the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society;
they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological
betrayal. Yet they cannot actually participate in this
counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated.
No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power,
because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would
have to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat,
while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because
the bureaucracys official line is that there is
no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent
on the central seal of legitimacy provided by
the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation
in its socialist regime of all the bureaucrats
it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are
collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the
cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the
concentration of their terrorist power in a single person.
In this person resides the only practical truth of the
ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable
boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted.
Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a
member of the ruling bureaucracy who should be
considered a proletarian in power and who
branded a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and
the Mikado. The atomized bureaucrats can find their
collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin
the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as
the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit exists.
The lord of the world recognizes his own nature
omnipresent power through the destructive
violence he exerts against the contrastingly powerless
selfhood of his subjects. He is the power that defines
the terrain of domination, and he is also the power
that ravages that terrain.
108
When ideology has become total through its possession
of total power, and has changed from partial truth to
totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so
totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level
of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist.
Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual
present in which whatever has previously happened is determined
solely by its police. The project already envisioned by
Napoleon of monarchically controlling memory
has been realized in Stalinisms constant rewriting
of the past, which alters not only the interpretations
of past events but even the events themselves. But the
price paid for this liberation from all historical reality
is the loss of the rational frame of reference that is
indispensable to capitalism as a historical social
system. The Lysenko fiasco is just one well-known example
of how much the scientific application of ideology gone
mad has cost the Russian economy. This contradiction
the fact that a totalitarian bureaucracy trying to administer
an industrialized society is caught between its need for
rationality and its repression of rationality is
also one of its main weaknesses in comparison with normal
capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot
resolve the question of agriculture as ordinary capitalism
has done, it also proves inferior to the latter in the
field of industrial production, because its unrealistic
authoritarian planning is based on omnipresent falsifications.
109
Between the two world wars the revolutionary working-class
movement was destroyed by the joint action of the Stalinist
bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism (the latters
organizational form having been inspired by the totalitarian
party that had first been tested and developed in Russia).
Fascism was a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois
economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian
subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist
society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose
of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention.
But this rationalization is hampered by the extreme irrationality
of its methods. Although fascism rallies to the defense
of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become
conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism),
while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed
workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned
by the socialist movements failure to bring about
a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological.
It presents itself as what it is a violent resurrection
of myth calling for participation in a community
defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader.
Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism.
Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in
the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning
and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation
of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction
of the old working-class movement also makes it one of
the founding forces of present-day society. But since
it is also the most costly method of preserving
the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being
replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent
stronger and more rational forms of that order.
110
When the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in
doing away with the vestiges of bourgeois property that
hampered its rule over the economy, and in developing
this economy for its own purposes, and in being recognized
as a member of the club of great powers, it wants to enjoy
its world in peace and to disencumber itself from the
arbitrariness to which it is still subjected. It thus
denounces the Stalinism at its origin. But this denunciation
remains Stalinist arbitrary, unexplained, and subject
to continual modification because the ideological
lie at its origin can never be revealed. The bureaucracy
cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically
because its existence as a class depends on its ideological
monopoly, which, for all its cumbersomeness, is its sole
title to power. This ideology has lost the passion of
its original expression, but its passionless routinization
still has the repressive function of controlling all thought
and prohibiting any competition whatsoever. The bureaucracy
is thus helplessly tied to an ideology that is no longer
believed by anyone. The power that used to inspire terror
now inspires ridicule, but this ridiculed power still
defends itself with the threat of resorting to the terrorizing
force it would like to be rid of. Thus, at the very time
when the bureaucracy hopes to demonstrate its superiority
on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to be a
poor cousin of capitalism. Just as its actual
history contradicts its façade of legality and its crudely
maintained ignorance contradicts its scientific pretensions,
so its attempt to vie with the bourgeoisie in the production
of commodity abundance is stymied by the fact that such
abundance contains its own implicit ideology,
and is generally accompanied by the freedom to choose
from an unlimited range of spectacular pseudoalternatives
a pseudofreedom that remains incompatible with
the bureaucracys ideology.
111
The bureaucracys ideological title to power is
already collapsing at the international level. The power
that established itself nationally in the name of an ostensibly
internationalist perspective is now forced to recognize
that it can no longer impose its system of lies beyond
its own national borders. The unequal economic development
of diverse bureaucracies with competing interests that
have succeeded in establishing their own socialism
in more than one country has led to an all-out public
confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese
lie. From this point on, each bureaucracy in power will
have to find its own way; and the same is true for each
of the totalitarian parties aspiring to such power (notably
those that still survive from the Stalinist period among
certain national working classes). This international
collapse has been further aggravated by the expressions
of internal negation which first became visible to the
outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted
against the bureaucrats and demanded a government
of steel workers a negation which has in
one case already gone to the point of sovereign workers
councils in Hungary. But in the final analysis, this crumbling
of the global alliance of pseudosocialist bureaucracies
is also a most unfavorable development for the future
of capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is in the process
of losing the adversary that objectively supported it
by providing an illusory unification of all opposition
to the existing order. This division of labor between
two mutually reinforcing forms of the spectacle comes
to an end when the pseudorevolutionary role in turn divides.
The spectacular component of the destruction of the worker-class
movement is itself headed for destruction.
The only current partisans of the Leninist illusion are
the various Trotskyist tendencies, which stubbornly persist
in identifying the proletarian project with an ideologically
based hierarchical organization despite all the historical
experiences that have refuted that perspective. The distance
that separates Trotskyism from a revolutionary critique
of present-day society is related to the deferential distance
the Trotskyists maintain regarding positions that were
already mistaken when they were acted on in real struggles.
Trotsky remained fundamentally loyal to the upper bureaucracy
until 1927, while striving to gain control of it so as
to make it resume a genuinely Bolshevik foreign policy.
(It is well known, for example, that in order to help
conceal Lenins famous Testament he went
so far as to slanderously disavow his own supporter Max
Eastman, who had made it public.) Trotsky was doomed by
his basic perspective, because once the bureaucracy became
aware that it had evolved into a counterrevolutionary
class on the domestic front, it was bound to opt for a
similarly counterrevolutionary role in other
countries (though still, of course, in the name of revolution).
Trotskys subsequent efforts to create a Fourth International
reflect the same inconsistency. Once he had become an
unconditional partisan of the Bolshevik form of organization
(which he did during the second Russian revolution), he
refused for the rest of his life to recognize that the
bureaucracy was a new ruling class. When Lukács, in 1923,
presented this same organizational form as the long-sought
link between theory and practice, in which proletarians
cease being mere spectators of the events
that occur in their organization and begin consciously
choosing and experiencing those events, he was describing
as merits of the Bolshevik Party everything that that
party was not. Despite his profound theoretical
work, Lukács remained an ideologue, speaking in the name
of the power that was most grossly alien to the proletarian
movement, yet believing and pretending that he found himself
completely at home with it. As subsequent events
demonstrated how that power disavows and suppresses its
lackeys, Lukácss endless self-repudiations revealed
with caricatural clarity that he had identified with the
total opposite of himself and of everything he
had argued for in History and Class Consciousness.
No one better than Lukács illustrates the validity of
the fundamental rule for assessing all the intellectuals
of this century: What they respect is a precise
gauge of their own degradation. Yet Lenin had
hardly encouraged these sorts of illusions about his activities.
On the contrary, he acknowledged that a political
party cannot examine its members to see if there are contradictions
between their philosophy and the party program.
The party whose idealized portrait Lukács had so inopportunely
drawn was in reality suited for only one very specific
and limited task: the seizure of state power.
Since the neo-Leninist illusion carried on by present-day
Trotskyism is constantly being contradicted by the reality
of modern capitalist societies (both bourgeois and bureaucratic),
it is not surprising that it gets its most favorable reception
in the nominally independent underdeveloped
countries, where the local ruling classes versions
of bureaucratic state socialism end up amounting to little
more than a mere ideology of economic development.
The hybrid composition of these ruling classes tends to
correspond to their position within the bourgeois-bureaucratic
spectrum. Their international maneuvering between those
two poles of capitalist power, along with their numerous
ideological compromises (notably with Islam) stemming
from their heterogeneous social bases, end up removing
from these degraded versions of ideological socialism
everything serious except the police. One type of bureaucracy
establishes itself by forging an organization capable
of combining national struggle with agrarian peasant revolt;
it then, as in China, tends to apply the Stalinist model
of industrialization in societies that are even less developed
than Russia was in 1917. A bureaucracy able to industrialize
the nation may also develop out of the petty bourgeoisie,
with power being seized by army officers, as happened
in Egypt. In other situations, such as the aftermath of
the Algerian war of independence, a bureaucracy that has
established itself as a para-state authority in the course
of struggle may seek a stabilizing compromise by merging
with a weak national bourgeoisie. Finally, in the former
colonies of black Africa that remain openly tied to the
American and European bourgeoisie, a local bourgeoisie
constitutes itself (usually based on the power of traditional
tribal chiefs) through its possession of the state.
Foreign imperialism remains the real master of the economy
of these countries, but at a certain stage its native
agents are rewarded for their sale of local products by
being granted possession of a local state a state
that is independent from the local masses but not from
imperialism. Incapable of accumulating capital, this artificial
bourgeoisie does nothing but squander the surplus
value it extracts from local labor and the subsidies it
receives from protector states and international monopolies.
Because of the obvious inability of these bourgeois classes
to fulfill the normal economic functions of a bourgeoisie,
they soon find themselves challenged by oppositional movements
based on the bureaucratic model (more or less adapted
to particular local conditions). But if such bureaucracies
succeed in their fundamental project of industrialization,
they produce the historical conditions for their own defeat:
by accumulating capital they also accumulate a proletariat,
thus creating their own negation in countries where that
negation had not previously existed.
114
In the course of this complex and terrible evolution
which has brought the era of class struggles to a new
set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries
has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective.
In a fundamental sense, it has also lost its illusions.
But it has not lost its being. The proletariat has not
been eliminated. It remains irreducibly present within
the intensified alienation of modern capitalism. It consists
of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power
over their lives and who, once they become aware of
this, redefine themselves as the proletariat, the
force working to negate this society from within. This
proletariat is being objectively reinforced by the virtual
elimination of the peasantry and by the increasing degree
to which the service sectors and intellectual
professions are being subjected to factorylike working
conditions. Subjectively, however, this proletariat
is still far removed from any practical class consciousness,
and this goes not only for white-collar workers but also
for blue-collar workers, who have yet to become aware
of any perspective beyond the impotence and mystifications
of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers
that its own externalized power contributes to the constant
reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in
the form of its alienated labor but also in the form of
the trade unions, political parties, and state powers
that it had created in the effort to liberate itself,
it also discovers through concrete historical experience
that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified
externalizations and all specializations of power. It
bears a revolution that cannot leave anything
outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent
domination of the present over the past and a total critique
of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms
of action to carry out this revolution. No quantitative
amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation
in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for
its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat cannot truly
recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered,
nor in the righting of any particular wrong.
It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many
such wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute
wrong of being excluded from any real life.
115
New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically
advanced countries. Although these signs are misunderstood
and falsified by the spectacle, they are sufficient proof
that a new period has begun. We have already seen the
failure of the first proletarian assault against capitalism;
now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance.
On one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are
being repressed first of all by the unions; on the other,
rebellious youth are raising new protests, protests which
are still vague and confused but which clearly imply a
rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized
politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous struggle
that is at first taking on a criminal appearance.
They foreshadow a second proletarian assault against class
society. As the lost children of this as yet immobile
army reappear on this battleground a battleground
which has changed and yet remains the same they
are following a new General Ludd who, this
time, urges them to attack the machinery of permitted
consumption.
The long-sought political form through which the
working class could carry out its own economic liberation
has taken on a clear shape in this century, in the form
of revolutionary workers councils which assume all decisionmaking
and executive powers and which federate with each other
by means of delegates who are answerable to their base
and revocable at any moment. The councils that have actually
emerged have as yet provided no more than a rough hint
of their possibilities because they have immediately been
opposed and defeated by class societys various defensive
forces, among which their own false consciousness must
often be included. As Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting
for the power of workers councils poses problems
rather than providing a solution. But it is precisely
within this form of social organization that the problems
of proletarian revolution can find their real solution.
This is the terrain where the objective preconditions
of historical consciousness are brought together
the terrain where active direct communication
is realized, marking the end of specialization, hierarchy
and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions
into conditions of unity. In this process
proletarian subjects can emerge from their struggle against
their contemplative position; their consciousness is equal
to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves
because this consciousness has become inseparable from
coherent intervention in history.
117
With the power of the councils a power that must
internationally supplant all other forms of power
the proletarian movement becomes its own product. This
product is nothing other than the producers themselves,
whose goal has become nothing other than their own fulfillment.
Only in this way can the spectacles negation of
life be negated in its turn.
118
The appearance of workers councils during the first quarter
of this century was the most advanced expression of the
old proletarian movement, but it was unnoticed or forgotten,
except in travestied forms, because it was repressed and
destroyed along with all the rest of the movement. Now,
from the vantage point of the new stage of proletarian
critique, the councils can be seen in their true light
as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated movement.
The historical consciousness that recognizes that the
councils are the only terrain in which it can thrive can
now see that they are no longer at the periphery of a
movement that is subsiding, but at the center of a movement
that is rising.
119
A revolutionary organization that exists before the establishment
of the power of workers councils will discover its own
appropriate form through struggle; but all these historical
experiences have already made it clear that it cannot
claim to represent the working class. Its task,
rather, is to embody a radical separation from the
world of separation.
120
Revolutionary organization is the coherent expression
of the theory of praxis entering into two-way communication
with practical struggles, in the process of becoming practical
theory. Its own practice is to foster the communication
and coherence of these struggles. At the revolutionary
moment when social separations are dissolved, the organization
must dissolve itself as a separate organization.
121
A revolutionary organization must constitute an integral
critique of society, that is, it must make a comprehensive
critique of all aspects of alienated social life while
refusing to compromise with any form of separate power
anywhere in the world. In the organizations struggle
with class society, the combattants themselves
are the fundamental weapons: a revolutionary organization
must thus see to it that the dominant societys conditions
of separation and hierarchy are not reproduced within
itself. It must constantly struggle against its deformation
by the ruling spectacle. The only limit to participation
in its total democracy is that each of its members must
have recognized and appropriated the coherence of the
organizations critique — a coherence that must be
demonstrated both in the critical theory as such and in
the relation between that theory and practical activity.
122
As capitalisms ever-intensifying imposition of
alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for
workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment,
putting them in the position of having to reject that
impoverishment in its totality or not at all,
revolutionary organization has had to learn that it
can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated
forms of struggle.
123
Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition
that, for the first time, theory as understanding of human
practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires
that workers become dialecticians and put their thought
into practice. It thus demands of its people without
qualities more than the bourgeois revolution demanded
of the qualified individuals it delegated to carry out
its tasks (because the partial ideological consciousness
developed by a segment of the bourgeois class was based
on the economy, that central part of social life
in which that class was already in power). The
development of class society to the stage of the spectacular
organization of nonlife is thus leading the revolutionary
project to become visibly what it has always
been in essence.
124
Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary
ideology, and it knows it.
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