05.04.09

Take me to your leader

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:47 pm by nemo

Is the consciousness of the masses too low? Or is the problem one of leadership?
By Josef Falkinger
Monday, 04 May 2009

It is fashionable among some layers on the left to blame the workers’ “low consciousness” for the lack of a genuine left alternative emerging within the labour movement internationally. This is utterly false and represents a lack of understanding of how the working class moves historically. The working class is fully aware of the situation it is in. What it requires is a leadership up to task of leading the class in its struggle to change society.

These marxist cliches are dinosaurs of the nineteenth century. The ‘low consciousness’ of the masses is a problem, so is that of the elite, and, before I forget, the ‘low consciousness’ of the ‘marxist left’ ought to induce the masses to spit in their face.
The left is blocked by marxist dead weight and the refusal or inability of leftists to review their position, ideology, and assumptions, or to study their history.
When I signed up for the Internet back ca. 1999 I expected to transcend isolation and contact all sorts of people on the left. When I did, the first thing I said was that we needed a new left, that everyone should read The Black Book Of Communism so we could start over, etc…
Actually that incident was the last time I had a communication on the left. It is impossible to even exchange emails with anyone on the left if you deviate from the tired cliches.
I find that worse than unfortunate, I find it silly, and a very ‘low consciousness’.
It would be nice could if one could just start over. Socialism, before Marx made it a Germanic authoritarian brand of Hegelianism dominated by his neurotic obsession with his own brilliance, was actually a thriving confusion.
Marx’s fragments are useful up to a point, but his work simply does not constitute a coherent brand on the left.
And his followers are incapable of studying their own tradition, what to say its critics. Most of the leftists have never read a single critique of their subject and still ply failed marxist cliches that were exposed in the nineteenth century.

After Bolshevism we should be going back to that earliest moment of the eighteen forties to start over (a statement about the theory/scholarship). The longer the delay, the longer anything real will come out of the left. It is probably a lost cause. A new language is needed. And there is one fortunate thing here: Marx/Engels never defined socialism. So one can start over with an almost clean slate.
Perhaps it will take another century, like the delay after the English Civil War up until the American/French Revolutions.

The problems with marxism aren’t such a big deal. Marx and Engels join the pool of socialist thought, where they started from. But the current deadbeat seriousness of the frozen marxist left is like a zombie’s ritual.
The working class sensibly avoids such people.
And it is not as if marxism were all that brilliant. Look at Chavez, et al. They are floundering in possibilities unrealized. And not a single person on the left can suggest anything constructive. That’s because the left is so frozen in Leninist mindsets, they have never done any research on just how they might actually construct a real socialism.
Perhaps the Stalinists are too entrenched.
Who knows. But it is rank arrogance for these dinosaur Marxists to presume to speak of the consciousness of the working class.
The working class is savvy enough to know Marxists are not their leaders. I ought to know. I consider myself working class, although in times like these you can double down as lumpenprole.
Thus I speak of the ‘Ultra far left’, beyond the current left, which is a kind of ‘conservative fixation’ on the Marxist cadre tradition.
The first thing to do is to study the critiques of Marxism, not always from the right. You will discover that the subject, behind the surge of Leninism that veiled the reality, peaked theoretically in the early twentieth century. At that point a start was needed, but never happened.

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