Saturday, June 6, 2009

31

the pro-revolutionaries are in good faith. How can anyone say
the working class should act politically? surely this goes to the
heart of the problem of consciousness and the function of the
working class; it is not for the working class to support or oppose
nations, fascism, democracy, or any other political form; how could
this opposition organize itself? How could the Kosovan proletariat
oppose Serbia, or the Serbian proletariat oppose Slobbo, or indeed
the proletariat of the West oppose NATO? To live in a European
slum is surely better than dying in a concentration camp but how
could the proletariat intervene and make a choice in such an
alternative? The working class is not a politically constituted body,
it cannot make final judgments on political question by making a
bloc intervention - political strategies are more likely to divide the
working class than unify it, which is the purpose of democracy.
Politics always functions to obscure self-knowledge of self-interest.


Further thoughts and explanations

We do not say that consciousness is impossible although we
suspect it is (otherwise why has it been forgotten? How did it pass
into non-existence so that we must talk about it being resurrected
before a revolution can take place?), we simply cannot see
consciousness competing with ideology under present conditions.
Therefore, we suspect that all pretenses at consciousness in the
past shows themselves to be ideology that is, we suspect that all
ideas-led revolutions in the past were not a realization of working
class consciousness in society but seizures of state power by the
bourgeoisie, who used 'revolutionary consciousness' as an
ideology. The ruse of higher imperatives masked the illegality of
their appropriations. None of this necessarily forecloses the
possibility of an authentic consciousness, it is possible that the
great spirit of enlightenment will descend into the clayish heads of
the masses and they will at last see the truth. But we should all be
very skeptical when it is claimed that this is actually occurring. It
seems to us that every half-definition of consciousness given to us
during the months we have been formulating our critique is
precisely what we define as a leadership impulse - we have been
disappointed to discover such disagreeable codes flashing though
the texts of our comrades.

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