Saturday, June 6, 2009

11

We start, as we end, in simplicity

The closest that the world has ever been to communism (it
probably wasn't that close) was at the end of the First World War;
there has never been a time before or since when the world was
so open to the possible. But what are to make of the
inscrutable events of this near miss? How applicable are those
facts now? And what of the context? What value should we place
on our pro-revolutionary theory on the part played by the objective
conditions, that is, the conditions not created by revolutionaries?
Or put another way, how much of what happens in revolution is
not designed or led by revolutionaries?

Many pro-revolutionaries argue that there can be no revolutionary
attempt without the significant input of a revolutionary
consciousness, but we are not so sure. In fact we are so unsure
that we cannot grasp the precise meaning that they project onto
the terms 'revolutionary consciousness' and 'working class
consciousness'. We are also unsure whether these pro-
revolutionaries really have a grip on the concepts they perceive to
be indispensable. We try to keep an open mind about the events
that will make up the revolution but we fail to see a revolutionary
role for any form of political consciousness, revolutionary or
otherwise. Quite the contrary, when we consider past
revolutionary attempts and pro-revolutionary organization and their
political interventions we see in the function of consciousness only
an inhibiting influence.

In our opinion a great number of pro-revolutionaries hold onto the
'consciousness' model as part of the habit of being a pro-
revolutionary, it is woven into their being: they muse sell their
paper, perform actions that are designed to inspire others, and
defend the integrity of their group. However, we also think that
most of them (and this also includes most of those who do not
belong to an official group, and who don't produce a regular paper)
do not have a properly formed conception of what working class
consciousness really is, or a working knowledge of how it is to be
transmitted to those who do not have it

Some formulations of consciousness by pro-revolutionaries are
extremely naive, one recently informed that it was 'being
awake', we chose to consider and investigate this statement

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