More realistic than any attempt to push Obama to the left.

We are all familiar with the organizer who organizer who organizes for the sake of organizing, with the politics which prioritizes tactical success in immediate daily work, while paying sterile lip service to an ultimate goal which is hardly taken seriously.

Indeed this type of activism is the norm at least in North America:

Take the case of Wisconsin where a puerile excitement over the manipulative games of Democratic Party state legislators (or worse the police “joining the people”), was far more common then a sober class perspective. Or the incoherent enthusiasm over the Arab uprisings which culminated in the idiotic comparison of the Libyan rebels to the social revolutionary factions in the Spanish Civil War.

Reactions such as these are symptomatic of a tendency which reduces political militancy to glorified social work and drowns any long term revolutionary perspective in the “urgent need” to achieve “practical” goals. .

Thus one is reduced to a disjointed struggle for reform, cheering all the representatives of populist nationalism and social democracy from Micheal Moore to Evo Morales with equal enthusiasm.

Any specific and analytical understanding of social reality which seeks to transcend the structural contradictions of the capitalist mode of production through the abolition of wage labor and the dichotomies it perpetuates is passed over in favor of an insubstantial lowest common denominator demand for “social justice”.

Obtaining the broadest base of “support” through the whole jettisoning of meaningful political content is prioritized over the hard work of contributing to the political construction of the class by the uncompromising assertion of the communist program.

There is nothing “realistic” about accepting the social democratic conception of what is possible, and reducing ones own political commitment to a paid position applying bandages to the gaping wounds of a slowly collapsing system.

France, Greece, the Arab insurrections, the European uprisings against austerity from Iceland to the Baltic, the flaming factories of Dhaka, the street fighting in Bishkek and the strike wave in China.

The spontaneous and incoherent response of the working class to the escalating capitalist offensive is already a global material reality. And the occasional explosions of mass violence occur against the backdrop of the universal experience of disaffection with the wage, the “pre-political” expression of nascent proletarian antagonism in mental illness, social dysfunction and apathy.

What do the populist politics of reform, disconnected single issue campaigns and “coalition building” have to say to this mute experience which struggles to find a voice?

Nothing:

They smother it and do their part in reproducing the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois with appeals to democracy, worker’s rights and the whole rhetorical paraphernalia of the commodity producing subject.

Because open articulation of the need to impose the communist program through insurrection would (we are told) “alienate” the mass of people. As if the mass of people were not already “alienated” from themselves in a quite literal sense of the word.

Constructed as functional subjects in the course of a violent dissociation from our own experience generated by waged and unwaged labor, sexual abuse, prisons, mass media and education, and medical and psychiatric “care”, the best the reformist left can offer us is complacent assistance in the perpetuation of the state of constant disassociation which is the substance of our daily misery.

And when the ever present contradiction between the forces and the relations of production erupts into the open we are enjoined to watch enthusiastically or offer our uncritical support when such explosions are inevitably recuperated into struggles for democratic social and political reform.

The task at hand is not the “struggle for social justice” but the organization of the party to coordinate and diffuse proletarian violence and affinity within the context of the protracted class war for the imposition of the communist program.

A program which can be summed up with elegant simplicity:

Freedom from wage dependency and freedom from sexual violence, the decisive end of the expropriation and mutilation of the creative energy of the body.

The death blow to the process which begins historically with the commodification of women and climaxes in the commodification of everything.

Any other program has nothing to say to the speechless forcibly silenced suffering which defines our lives.

Source

Categories: Economics, Editorials, History, Imperialism, Labor, Media & Culture, Revolutionary History, Science, Theory, U.S. News, Uncategorized, United States History, Workers Struggle, World History