A Critique of Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Theory, a Hegel-Debord-Fisher Synthesis

“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) favoured 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.” With the religion of orthodox Marxism, worker states have become a representation of worker liberation in the same sense that worker unions under capitalism do. They give the working class a feeling of liberation and freedom through mere representations of such, while reinforcing systems of class dominance. What happens in any revolution that worships “science” and “vanguard leadership” is the formation of the “Other,” Simply put, Othering is “a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. It is an effect that influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group versus those who are seen as being part of the out-group.” Debord unknowingly explains how all not in the Vanguard were deemed “other”... “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.” Leading the revolution becomes an identity one can fulfill, and all of those outside of such identity are deemed intellectually irrelevant, which has disastrous consequences. Firstly, it destroys any chance at outside group consciousness. Group consciousness is, “first of all a consciousness of the (cultural, political, existential) machineries which produce subjugation — the machineries which normalize the dominant group and create a sense of inferiority in the subjugated. But, secondly, it is also a consciousness of the potency of the subjugated group — a potency that depends upon this very raised state of consciousness.” (Fisher) For example, radical feminists of the 70s were able to raise their collective conscious after coming together, discussing their individual issues each of them face in their daily lives (unfair housing structures, discriminatory work structures, etc), and were able to realize their individual issues were linked to political structures, and were able to raise group consciousness. This phenomenon of group consciousness is an absolute must for any chance at true liberation from oppressive structures, for it is impossible for all intellectuals to know of all oppression against every subjugated group… because that is the point, group consciousness is impossible to raise until the individuals within the subjugated groups realize their problems are linked to some structure. In a revolution that uses the religion of orthodox Marxism, all group consciousness outside the identity of the “intellectual revolutionary” is impossible to raise, because the identity of “intellectual revolutionary” is the only identity that represents knowledge of oppression and struggle, and all people that are “other” are to fulfill different identities, destroying any chance at a point of view of structural oppression that the Vanguard can’t realize. With this antagonism, the authoritarian revolution creates a new form of class domination, one of intellectual domination. One class rules over the other in all spheres of political discourse and ideas labeled “important,” “true,” and “relevant.” This is the natural result of any revolution led by one class over the other. That intellectual vanguard is completely blind to issues that society wasn’t aware of when that Vanguard was being created. It is a constant, subconscious societal antagonism between the class of intellectual dominators and all others, the intellectually subjugated. New, authoritarian forms of power and discipline arise through this intellectual thought and discourse control, recreating the forms of biopolitical power that exist within a Bourgeois liberal democracy.