Author: heisse

Kontra-sokdem

The principle of the historical invariance of doctrines which reflect the tasks of protagonist classes, and also all the potent referring back to founding principles, stands opposed to the gossipy assumption that every generation and every season of intellectual fashion is more powerful than the previous one. It rejects the whole silly film show which portrays the relentless advance of civil progress, and other such bourgeois prejudices from which very few of those who lay claim to the adjective “Marxist” are really free. It is a principle which applies to every great historical period.

ICP. The Historical Invariance of Marxism.

Yesterday

Social Democracy was born blue. If one wishes to trace the putrefaction of the socialist movement back to its first act of betrayal, one need only stand at the threshold of August 1914 and take in the stench of the German Social Democratic Party voting for war credits. In the sublime of parliamentary prostitution, the entire tradition of pretended proletarian politics immolated itself on the altar of national chauvinism, and the smoke that rose from the burnt offering was thick with the rhetoric of “lesser evils”, “national defense”, and the eternal immaturity of conditions.

It was the culmination of decades during which the party of Bebel, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg had become a well-oiled apparatus for administering capitalism under the incantatory headmast of socialism, its midwives the humble revisionist Bernstein and the unctuous center-keeper Kautsky, men who transmogrified Marxism into a quasi-progressive Church of good manners and trade-union accounts. The movement that had once declared that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself had, by bureaucratic mitosis, produced a leadership with a credo that the realization of socialism on earth must be subsidized by the bourgeoisie.

Social Democracy blossoms into its own florid and farcical blooms in the Philippine tropics. Two in particular, conjoined twins born from the same, each accusing the other of being counterfeit (cf. CPP: “Akbayan is pseudo-leftist”), while both replicate with the faith of a provincial imitator their decomposed European ancestors.

On one side, we have the citizen-politicians of Akbayan, who, having emerged from the wreckage of the Maoist Communist Party’s renegade faction in the 1990s, openly genuflect before the ballot box, spouting the pieties of “democratic socialism” which, stripped of its pleasant upholstery, means nothing more than administering neoliberal austerity with a human face and a well-remunerated NGO sector. Their project is thorough honest whoredom to the electoral circus so transparent in its class collaboration that one almost admires the candor with which they substitute class struggle with focus-group-tested platitudes about “inclusive growth” and “social accountability”, as though the problem with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is that it has not been sufficiently accountable to its subjects.

On the left side of the isle is the National Democratic movement, that lumbering beast of dog-eared copies of On Protracted War and stale united-front hagiology, which imagines itself the revolutionary alternative because it wears a uniform and carries a gun. The National Democratic Front—and its puppet-master Communist Party—has perfected the insurrectionary aestheticization of Social Democracy. They pursue a “national democratic revolution”, theoretically the spiritual continuation of the aborted Katipunan revolution, that, in its obsessive staging of tactical alliances with any disgruntled landlord or provincial warmonger who can mutter patriotic anti-imperialist slogans, remain tailing the national bourgeoisie, becoming its pressure group in the hills and, when the political winds shift, its emissaries at the peace table. Their armed struggle functionally becomes a bargaining chip for what they project to be eventual coalition governments, betraying a long historical record of failure from Macapagal to Duterte, and “genuine” agrarian reform that preserves private property in land, all while humming an off-key Internationale into the humid night.

The NDF and Akbayan despise each other with the special venom reserved for rivals fighting over the same swill; the former scorns the latter’s parliamentarist naivete, while the latter scorns the former’s out-of-date militarism. For communists, it has always been clear that they are opportunist species of the same genus that feeds on the carcass of revolutionary possibility, one through the electoral road and the other through the chimeric people’s war. Together, they form a social-democratic archipelago in civil war.

The German revisionists of 1914 offered the Kaiser their patriotic bodies; the Filipino opportunists of the 21st century offer the capitalist state their bodies electoral and ballistic. The humidity accelerates the rot.

Today

And when one points out these obscenities, the cry goes up from both camps: “Purists! Dogmatists! Ultra-leftists! Sectarians!” It is the universal squawk of the opportunist confronted with the revulsion of the principled, a word-spell to exorcise the specter of class truth by diagnosing it a psychopathology. Palatino, struck with creative inspiration, would call the Left critics of the Villar-BAYAN situation in 2010 as “ambitious apostates” and “fundamentalist freaks”. In reality, their accusations of purism is no more than bourgeois phrasemongering that performs the neat trick of dismissing any consistent proletarian partisanship as a personality disorder. As any good socialist knows, cooperating with the ruling classes is simply hard-headed realism forced upon us by le material conditions, which is basically Marxist materialism, or whatever.

Ironically enough the charge of “dogmatism” is itself the most guilty dogma of counter-revolutionary leftism. Dogmatism is a talisman brandished against anyone who reminds them that the proletariat has interests irreconcilable with those of the bourgeoisie and its satraps. What, after all, does our saintly “anti-purist” actually mean when he prates about the danger of isolation and the necessity of “broad unity”? He simply means that the proletarian movement must put itself under the hydraulic press of the bourgeoisie to prove its willing pacifism and harmlessness, that it must mutilate its demands, purge its memory of the Spartacist Uprising and the Cultural Revolution, and learn the cuckolded language of policy proposals and transitional demands all so that the functionaries may sit at tables with the powerful and feel the warm glow of being taken seriously.

But after Marxism had ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the tendencies expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels. The forms and causes of the struggle changed, but the struggle continued. Pre-Marxist socialism has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism (…) And it patently follows from the very nature of this [revisionist] policy that it may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less “new” question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though it change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another. The inevitability of revisionism is determined by its class roots in modern society. Revisionism is an international phenomenon (…) [So is] “revisionism from the left”.

VI Lenin. Marxism and Revisionism.

One might recall the 2010 dissenter movement within the Maoist Party cohering around the outlet Bulatlatan to polemicize against the Party’s decision to endorse and campaign with the Villar–Marcos tandem; or the 2012 debacle between Akbayan, who was in too deep with the Aquino government, and Anakbayan, who represented in that lightning rally the National Democrat partylists; or the 2016 situation between the butcher Duterte and the all-too-eager CPP–NDF. Just how utterly, inanely pathetic is it, as self-professed socialists, to bicker over who is the Real Partylist™ to be rightfully recognized by the bourgeois state?

Despite the defeats incurred by sequences of the left throwing itself off a cliff via electoral and activist opportunism, our socialist petty-politicians insist that the next attempt will be different. Meanwhile, stating what is an a posteriori derivation, that is, do not throw yourself off a fucking cliff or you will break bones including your skull, is apparently the naive, puritan, doctrinaire, dogmatic conclusion. But maybe gravity doesn’t apply in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society.

Social Democracy is characterized by a remarkable arrogance that it always finds within itself the means to manipulate the material of the State and of capitalist society generally as it freely wishes without permanently staining its hands with blood. The common kernel of all Social Democratic movements today as it was in history, from Noske and Lassalle to Stalin and Mao to Gramsci and today’s Neokauts is that class society, barring the nebulous impression of “present material conditions” (i.e., the electoral prospects), is an open field of maneuver where one can do what one pleases. This of course runs into the immediate problem posed by Social Democrats when convenient of the “need to learn from history”, by which they mean Trump won because the stubborn puritan party of the Communists, comprised of about 20 people maximum in the US, did not vote for Harris, and so Communists must always “vote blue no matter who”. Today, Akbayan lauds the butcher Gibo Teodoro for genuinely no good reason whatsoever, exclaims our friends at the Left isle. We agree in principle in condemning any praise for butchers and lackeys of the murderous state, and we add: it doesn’t need a good reason is the reason; it is an openly Social Democratic party; opportunism outnumbers the platelets in its blood. It would be like asking ice cream to stop melting. The ND Left can get away with calling out Akbayan because it does not admit even to itself that it too is a Social Democratic movement, and thus also an opportunist’s nest. If (or when) tomorrow the ND Left once more finds its pet warlord or neoliberal girlboss to collar itself to, we shall hear the same excuses from its constituents as we today are forced to endure from Akbayan’s.

Akbayan merely shows the ND Left its future.

If our petty socialists were serious about self-criticism, they would be Communists! But obviously, self-criticism is also purism, dogmatism, doctrinaire, a ridiculous ask for activists under heavy fire—and activists are never not under heavy fire. What is to criticize? Nothing and everything. More pointedly: what is the measurement for criticism? The common yardstick to both is the democratic principle. This causes major confusion among vacillating activists and the most forward-looking elements of the youth and the working class, because democracy is supposed to be a universal good, an ideal always to be desired, and yet the Democratic Left is at odds with itself for not embodying enough True Democracy. So each side’s criticism of the other fails at the outset. Akbayan criticizes the National Democratic Left for not condemning the NPA, well, what the hell are you expecting? The NPA is the National Democratic revolution! On the other hand the ND Left criticizes Akbayan for “being a fake partylist”, when it has its own mass constituency across classes and sectors that it claims to represent, from women to workers. How does this criticism stand? Apparently because only the ND partylists are the real partylists, and thus they go self-flagellating in front of the democratic bourgeois State, citing like good and responsible republican citizens the democratic Constitution—which as we all know is a highly respected document by the bourgeois itself—in begging for this rightful recognition.

As I have written elsewhere, the democratic fetish of Maoists and Akbayanites…

treat democracy as a neutral indeterminate political form that can be tactically occupied and progressively transformed in the direction of communism and “service of the revolution”. Here democracy is instrumentalizable; provisional demands that expand political space, weaken repression, and enable proletarian self-organization, which will later overload the democratic shell and culminate in revolutionary rupture. But in truth what this does service to is the abstraction of democracy from its historical constitution and social function. (…) Democracy operates through abstraction. Its universality is achieved only by suppressing determinate social antagonisms and presenting individuals as formally equal bearers of rights and votes. (…) Class antagonism cannot appear within the democratic form as antagonism without destabilizing the form itself. Democracy is an identity-form that symbolically reconciles material contradictions innate to capitalist society, and neutralizes non-identity in the process of dissolving class antagonism into formal equality. Thus the proletariat ceases to appear as a class confronting capital, but becomes a demographic, if internally differentiated, aggregate whose interests are to be represented and managed in the State.

Fragments on Invariance.

But it is implicitly understood that self-criticism is only for convenient times, that is, when each can claim that they are the Party of Self-criticism.

In a society cleft by class, groaning under the weight of its own antagonisms, there is no such thing as purity in the abstract, only partisanship in the concrete. Under class society, the only partisanship which really exists is class partisanship.

In class society there is no view from nowhere.

To be a “purist” is simply to refuse to step into the same sewer as those who would have the workers pay with their blood for a program of class reconciliation. When the Akbayan petty-politico swoons over muh evidence-based policy and le constructive engagement, he is in fact swooning over the maintenance of exploitation and the prison complex of parliamentarism; while as the ND cadre waxes poetic about a historic bloc against imperialism, he is melting the revolution into a gelatinous puddle where communism is dissolved into the interests of the legendary unicorn that is the national bourgeoisie. Despite their mutual bickerings both are at least in complete agreement that the proletariat is too weak to trust its own praxis, and that it must forever be chaperoned by its social betters, i.e., the ever-benevolent, educated, samaritan, democratic petty-bourgeoisie.

“Purism” and “dogmatism” are, then, nothing but the phantom names for the terrifying idea that the working class might set itself in motion without permission from the middle-class activist-managers and the commissars of the people’s war. We are accused of fighting a phantom, but it is the anti-purists who inhabit a spectral world in which classes can be reconciled through dialogic magic.

Talk about religious psychosis!

Tomorrow

Our Great Elector is the rifle in the hands of the insurgent worker, who does not dream of depositing a paper ballot but of striking the enemy.

ICP. The Trotsky Question.

From the position our good friends so cavalierly deride as “purist” we report back with cheer: the class must amputate this carcinogenic limb of opportunist cretinism or it will die of tetanus.

The proletariat is an organism perpetually assaulted by fevers and viral infiltrations, each a syndrome of immunological compromise that persuades the body to attack its own revolutionary antibodies as foreign invaders. When Akbayan preaches the sweet reasonableness of incremental reform, it introduces a toxin that sedates the class into believing that capital can be negotiated with and that the revolution is itself the slow rearrangement of parliamentary seating; its entire practice is a prolonged suicide note written in the prose of economic conferences and civil society workshops where former student radicals and veteran ex-cadre learn to say “stakeholder engagement” without vomiting. When the National Democratic movement, on the other hand, sends its cadres to organize peasant communities around petty-bourgeois “land-to-the-tiller” programs that leave the structure of wage-labor and local usury intact, it introduces a revolution that is at once its counter-revolution. Social Democracy is the antibody of the Party of Order, policing the proletarian body so that it never quite develops the fevers necessary to expel the parasite of bourgeois ideology entirely.

The “dogmatist” who still clutches the threadbare texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the milieu of the Marxist Left observes all this and understands that the fight against opportunism is not a pedantic quarrel over who is the Real Partylist™ but a literal fight for the life of a class against the amnesiac forces of decomposition. The immunocompromised proletariat, dizzy with the infections of electoralism and activism, can only regain its health by a ruthless course of political antibiotics: the wholesale liquidation of every program that subordinates the independent movement of the proletariat to the interests of any other class.

What Akbayan and the NDF call the “purist” terror is, in truth, the basic hygienic reflex of a class that must break every tie with the bourgeoisie, its state, its legality, its nationalism, its compromises, and its sentimental attachment to spectacle. There is no happy communion table where the Communist and the Social-Democrat may break bread, no blended theology where “tactical flexibility” justifies the poisoning of the well. The historical party of the Communists expels the program and outlook of Social Democracy in all its forms as biophysical waste.

A new doctrine cannot appear at just any historical moment. There are given, very characteristic – and also very rare – periods in history when, like a dazzling beam of light, one can appear; and if the crucial moment is not recognised and the terrible light not faced, it is no good resorting to little candles instead; by which the way is lit for academic pedants and fighters of little faith.

ICP. The Historical Invariance of Marxism.

We in the Communist Left have always held steadfast to the necessity of the truth that the working class constitutes itself as a political subject on its own terrain, with its own world-historical interests—not in the antechambers of the bourgeoisie but against them, not within the courts of civilization but outside civilization, as the barbaric forces, to paraphrase Fanon, which will take history into its own hands and swarm into the forbidden cities.

Unlike the Dutertistas who mourn, we shall welcome the exercise of dictatorial democracy at the hands of the bourgeoisie, who everywhere creates the conditions for its overthrow in spite of itself. The various Democratic movements of the pseudo-proletarian milieu, from Social to National, have exhausted themselves in the last two centuries. We will sing and dance at its funeral at the hands of the insurgent, Communist proletariat.

Against them, we reassert, with the full splenetic force of those who have watched the proletarian movement die a thousand deaths from the inside, that the organism must be purged and the class truth screamed in their faces until their entire edifice of shamefaced collaboration collapses under the weight of its own cynicism. As a comrade once said, this persistent malady of the workers’ movement can only be treated with a classic kick in the ass.

A Consensual Revolution?

The self-evident and banal impossibility of such a thing confronts us and laughs, spattering saliva and all, upon our faces. Only the mercenary intelligence of the by-gone Utopian Socialists and today’s decomposing Liberals alike could conjure up such an imaginary. Does the worker consent to the conditions of her life and thus the very same which poses unto her the question of turning over the world in revolution? This is the question Nikka Gaddi poses to her internet e-mass base, and directs to the motley array of revolutionists of our times.

I. Yesterday

We find ourselves at the summit of liberal emancipation. The worker is free in two senses: free from the land, and free of property. This freedom, though, has been forced upon her. She has no obligation to the land and to a lord, and she has no property to sell to make a living. What she has is pure, purposive, creative human ability to labor. So when the worker engages in the labor-market, she engages in it as a seller of labor-power. Thus far, none of this has been to her active consent. Torn from the commons by enclosure and statute, her ancestors’ subsistence stripped away so that she might stand “free” before buyers of labor-power, this was the original compulsion that made her a worker in the first place. Then we have a freedom of the herring to be salted.

Proletarianization is precisely the process of de-subject-ification—i.e., of dehumanization. Where liberal bourgeois society relativizes the ability to consent to the sovereign individual, the human subject as such, the proletarian is definitionally not “human”. For the immutable tablets of Universal Human Rights declare unto bourgeois civilization the ‘right to property’, and whom among us has none? And whom among us counts as Human?

II. Who counts as Human?

She finds the Eden of the rights of man, where alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, Bentham, and enters the marketplace as a legal equal. Having offered up a contract, which she herself cannot pass up else she dies of starvation and cold, trampled by the bustling cities of apathetic urban civilization as a homeless, lifeless body upon the asphalt, she sells her capacity to labor for a day, for a wage.

So the job offer is sealed and thus her labor-power belongs to another. Inside the factory gates her purposive activity is no longer her own, set to work under rhythms dictated by machinery (her ilk had made to the profitable benefit of her employer) and the ticking clock. Every gesture of the arm, every twitch of the eyebrow is prescribed, fragmented, subordinated to a process she does not control. The products of her hands flow away from her into the warehouse and up into the market. She cannot take part of this of course–she gets paid in cash. So to access the fruits of her labor, the worker clocks out of the factory and dons the social role of the consumer. What the worker’s own hands created confronts her as a thing with its own life, a commodity owned by such a thing as “capital”, having grown from her living labor yet utterly alien to her. “Capital” dictates the rhythm, intensity, and organization of work, and, now as is made self-evident, even of consumption and the conditions of life itself. Wouldn’t you know it, she can’t afford the damn thing! Her own objectified life returns as a power that dominates her very being. The product of her labor acquires a life of its own, and in doing so strips her of authorship over the world.

So her labor dies. It’s dead. And corpses, not content with “weighing like nightmare” on our brains, do nothing but accumulate, so the products of yesteryear, congealed into machines and money, rise up as “capital”—a self-valorizing process that seems to move by its own volition. Capital purchases raw materials, machinery, and her labor-power (by now no longer purposive human activity as such but “capital” in and of itself), combines them, and conjures forth more value. Now the worker is a living appendage of this dead machinery. Capital’s command—accumulate, accumulate!—dictates the length of her day and the intensity of her toil. She is but a personification of wage-labor—and as far as the employer is concerned, a perfectly interchangeable [disposable] pair of hands. Her desires, her pains, her creative impulses matter only insofar as they can be disciplined into profitability.

In the completion of dehumanization, the proletarian becomes a living nerve grafted onto a dead body that, vampire-like, drains her life-force of every single drop.

Driven by the blind compulsion of self-expansion, this system periodically convulses into crises. It produces too much. Actually, she produces too much. The machines stutter and stop. She, having been too productive, is expelled onto the street, joining the “reserve army of labor”. Effectively she is pronounced dead, and the market periodically performs necromancy on that great mass to raise them to the status of undead, zombies haunting the living, threatening other workers by pushing the pressure of wages downward in competition with each other.

The myth of free contract shatters against the irrationality of a crisis she had no hand in creating. She starves because there is too much food! But “too much” is a relative thing, too, its meaning acquired according to the imperatives of profiteering. So she goes homeless because there are too many homes, becomes a thief because there is too much money, dies because there is too much medicine.

III. So the dead rise

Thus far, none of this has been to her active consent.

Out of this repeated whipping of booms and busts upon her flesh, repeated across millions of lives, whether by the blue moon’s chance or a never-again realignment of the stars, a “necessity” roots into the earth’s crust and forces a crack upon it to bloom in open air. The impossibility of living under these conditions ceases to be a private misfortune and becomes a collective condition. The worker, atomized by competition, is welded together with other workers by this immense suffering and impotence they all share. Even then, this is not to her active consent, but forced upon her by the excruciating pain of the empty stomach boiling in acid, the splitting pain of cracking bones. So the dead rise up, revolting against death. They take up the labor of grave-digging.

Observing the irreducible suffering of the working people in his time, and the advances in class struggle achieved thus far by history, Marx notes with exceptional clarity: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”

Even revolution then is not to her active consent. To escape this world, and in fact to destroy it, to smash it to pieces and burn it to ashes, to leave nothing standing in front of her—this is a most profound need, a world-historic necessity, forced upon her by the radical unfreedom, precisely in bourgeois freedom, that has defined her entire non-existence. The expropriators are expropriated—they must be expropriated. The fetters must be burst asunder. She is delivered into revolution by the full force of her dehumanization.

Only on the far side of that rupture does the possibility of freedom flicker into being. The working people are forced to make the leap to the ravine, in the rift of the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom.

IV. Guilty on three counts

So the liberal pieties about “consent” have been exposed. The solemn ritual of free will hollowed by the dull compulsion of the empty belly. Revolution by a majority vote in the parliament of the champagne-quaffing Socialist Petty-Politicians, the whole sorry carnival, with the interminable functionaries who have never felt the lash of real hunger—notwithstanding the traitorous salt-of-the-earth Labor cretins learned in the ways of machofeudal populism—is the wet dream of a stratum too impotent to imagine its own end except as an extension of its own procedures. Put simply: the working people cannot consent to revolution because they cannot consent to anything at all, insofar as they are, for the foreseeable future, to remain as workers. Proletarians are cattle, definitionally speaking. The root Latin of the word quite literally means ‘offspring’ (or the producer thereof being the sole source of one’s value to society). Consent itself is a category of bourgeois right, the legal form of the isolated monad, and it evaporates at once should we grasp that the subject who would consent is already the product of the very relations she is supposed to overthrow. So far, so good.

But what of those who, scorning this liberal wet dream, propose instead to make the revolution—to seize history by the throat with the iron will of the Party and the barrel of the gun? Here we encounter the second face of voluntarism, no less idealist for its martial postures, no less trapped in the inversion of materialist understanding for its pretensions to scientific strategy. The consent of the few makes no revolution but a hiking trip toward ranges infested by gun-touting State dogs, foaming with rabies at the mouth at the sight of dead students and journalists and scientists and farmers—leaving nothing behind but corpses martyrized in the pages of Ang Bayan and the smoking ruins of displaced communities. If the liberal imagines revolution as a sign-up form penned by willing individuals, the voluntarist imagines it not really that much differently, as a project executed by The Willing Few—the Party-army and the guerrilla column that replaces the absent class with its own motion and blood. If Nikka sees history as a negotiation among competing blocs of influence, National Democrats see it as raw material to be sculpted by sheer partisan audacity. Despite appearances, both fundamentally agree on the decisive point, which is that revolution is a product of the will. They merely disagree on whose will counts.

This shared ground is the very foundation of what has been known to the Left as the pathology of activism—the privileging of the motion of struggle itself as the index of revolutionary politics, the frantic assumption that, with enough Action thrown at one’s object, which could be anything, all shall be well, and will transmogrify into qualitative political development regardless of what the objective balance of class forces permits. Activism is the nervous tic of a politics that cannot wait, that cannot bear the immobility imposed by an unfavorable conjuncture, and so fills the void with ceaseless Doing. Its theoretical grounding, voluntarism, is the inversion of the materialist axiom that social being determines consciousness, substituting the overdetermining will of the organized, willing, Consenting minority for the actual development of the capital-labor contradiction as the motor of historical change. And its practical, tactical expression is invariably the adventurist attempt to force revolutionary outcomes through audacious blows when objective conditions do not support them, generating not the awakening of the masses, who remain in their day-jobs and villages watching, often with scorn, yet another self-immolation at the altar of “terrorism” and its impatience, but the exposure of the Consenting to repression and the destruction of organizational capacity that took years to build.

These three counts are the symptoms of an inability to grasp capitalism as a totality whose contradictions evolve according to determinate laws that constrain what is politically possible at any given moment, and the symptoms make the rot worse. They are the rage of the impotent will.

The People’s War, we are told, very much unlike the urban adventurists of Manila–Rizal just some decades ago, is a scientifically calibrated strategy, a long march through stages, a patient accumulation of forces that awaits the ripe moment. The guerrilla-liberated zone is the embryo of a new state; the Party-army is the formal expression of political power from the gun. This is voluntarism in its fullest institutional elaboration, and its apparent opposition to adventurism is precisely what makes it lethal as an opportunist rot. For the voluntarist logic is not an accidental excrescence on the PPW; it is demanded by its premises, by the very analysis that claims to ground it.

What is that analysis? The bankrupt semi-feudal and semi-colonial thesis, by mistaking the specific form of capitalist subsumption in the periphery for a hybrid of modes, writes the proletariat out of the script. The worker is no longer the subject whose very existence as variable-capital, as the living negation of the capital relation, necessitates it to be the grave-digger of the capitalist mode of life, but becomes merely one ragbag of The People to be mobilized, organized, and led under the capacious tent of the Party, who, having formalized the path forward, provides the “socialist perspective” of the petty-bourgeois revolution. But if the Party is not the concentrated expression of a class that is already, in its being, the antithesis of capital, then what is it? It is but a substitute, the few that must make the revolution because the actual movement of the class cannot be trusted to produce it. The Party-army is the world-historical subject, divinely annointed by itself, and Protracted War is simply the form through which the Consenting labors to bring forth a new society from the womb of the old, stillborn and blue as the baby always comes.

But the gun is not the servant of class power but its surrogate metallic fetish. The “new democracy” that PPW aims to build is a capitalism without compradors, a national capitalism with a red flag, and its historical role is not the abolition of wage-labor but its generalization under a different (crucial: Patriotic!) administrative configuration, and thus a voluntarism swollen into a state developmentalist project, and it is a bureaucracy no less anti-communist for the blood it spills.

Now comes the objection, half-sob, half-accusation: “But what should we do, then? Just wait? Sit on our hands and let capital grind on while we polish our theoretically pure knobs?”

This objection only appears compelling, of course, if one has already accepted the voluntarist premise that the only alternative to the National Democratic struggle is the inertia of the impotent sect. But this is precisely what is being contested. The communist response to a society mired in counterrevolution is not to pretend the conjuncture is something else by substituting the Will of the Few for the movement of the class. Nor is it to dissolve the program into opportunism by chasing the majority in conditions where the majority is atomized, passive, and saturated with bourgeois ideology from scalp to sole.

What militants embedded in the orbit of the CPP-NPA can concretely do is not nothing. It is the same thing communists have always done in conditions that do not permit the direct revolutionary assault: preserve theoretical clarity, refuse to subordinate class politics to interclassist alliance frameworks, work toward organizational forms that correspond to the general interests of the Filipino working class as a global class rather than as a national-popular subject, and above all, resist the catastrophic temptation to treat the party as the class. Keep the knife sharp. But the harder answer, the one that cuts to the bone, is that the CPP-NPA’s theoretical foundations are not errors attached to an otherwise sound communist core. The semi-feudal thesis, the substitutionist logic, the national-democratic horizon are not just tactical mistakes but precisely the direct expression of a voluntarism that can never, by any number and intensity of rectification movements, become the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. The rot of a few apples rots the entire barrel.

Ultimately both the cretinous Liberal and the gunpowder-headed Maoist are trapped in the same pathetically bourgeois subject-centered metaphysics that cannot grasp the dead-weight of prehistory, the blind autonomized movement of capital that drives toward its own negation without asking anyone’s permission. The working people do not consent to revolution and neither do they manufacture it in the guerrilla base area or the party headquarters. The revolution is forced upon them by the intolerable totality of their own dehumanization, and it is forced upon them with all the violence of a history that has never once consulted them. Only when the realm of necessity is brought under the conscious collective control of the associated producers and the working day is shortened to open the space of free human development—only there can the question of revolutionary “consent” even arise.

The People’s War is deemed guilty on three counts of Voluntarism, Activism, and Adventurism, and it must be forced to realize this guilt through the baptism of fire. History necessitates it.

V. The realm of freedom

We shall not “intend to save” anyone.

To consent to this life in any full sense is impossible. The conditions of existence are not available as conditions to be accepted or refused; they simply are, the way gravity simply is, and what passes for consent is only the daily reproduction of what has been given.

Consenting to life is possible only to new people. What propels us is the dead-weight of the human prehistory that is class society unto its end, and we are thus driven to leap by the impossibility of continuing as we are. Communism, the real movement, is “the riddle of history solved”, the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Just as against Rome the wild hordes were needed – so that so many and great useful contributions to the organisation of people and things would not be lost – which were unconscious contributors to a much bigger revolution still far away in time, we want the gates of this bourgeois world of profiteers, oppressors and butchers to be struck by a powerful barbaric wave capable of burying this world among itself.

Amadeo Bordiga. “Forward, Barbarians!” (1951)