Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults, Part V

This is how socialism arrived as a political force again into American politics, in the beating heart of Western capitalism: through the class treason of petty-bourgeois academics. This is also how socialism arrived as a political force at all in any society where it is present - as a glitch arising from the class contradictions of those who are educated too well and paid too poorly to keep fulfilling the role of the petties in the system. It does not arise spontaneously from the proles, who because of their false consciousness variously advocate answers to their troubles that will not work in the long term. Leave the revolution to the theoretical leadership of the unreconstructed conservative proles alone and your revolution will get better pay and working hours for a generation until the next generation's bougies decide to stop paying the guillotine insurance. It took petty bougie class traitors like Karl Marx (writer, married a class traitor Westphalen princess, lived off Engels' job as a petty) and Vladimir Lenin (minor nobility, writer, assumer of state power) to develop a better theory. It took people with the time and money to read and dream to set their sights beyond the pressing immediacy of particular problems and look to long-term structural reforms, to apply clear-sighted class analysis to the problems of the working class. Vladimir Lenin never aspired to win better working conditions from anyone's boss; he aspired to impale that boss' head on a stick as a lesson to the rest when he seized their factories.

He also took pains to spell this point out in What Is To Be Done, refuting claims that prole leadership of the beginning of the revolution was necessary. Since the proles did not have class consciousness and, in the material conditions of autocratic Russia could not spontaneously develop class consciousness, the next best thing was a society of professional revolutionaries drawn from the few educated workers as well as the petty class traitorate that could organize the sleepy masses for revolution. Lenin's thesis was tested, and it gave us seventy years of Soviet glory before the advanced capitalist nations of Earth destroyed it.

All of this is to say that the class base of Bernie's campaign in 2016, many individual supporters of which have since moved on to Marxism-Leninism, is sound. It derives both from the working class and from the petty class traitorate, as did Marxism, as did the Soviet Union. This is important, because it tells us that we can make a revolution out of these material conditions. Mao's experience, and Gorbachev's experience, and above all Trotsky's and Khrushchev's experience, tells us that we should be wary of the excessively petty base in the long term, lest the revolution be lost to a class traitorate taking power and changing their mind back from the inside. But as a beginning, it is strong.

But as socialism arises from petty class traitors in the first place, having more of this subclass can only make a revolution likelier. Moreover, the petties themselves are of amorphous loyalty and always have been, providing a class basis for class treason. There will still be cops after the revolution, but the cops in that day to come are probably in Antifa right now. There will be forces to provide for the security of the state; the difference is the state will be in prole hands, and so they will be doing the bidding of the proles instead of the bougies.

This was essentially the first "red petty-bourgeois" class, Lenin's "professional revolutionaries," because they existed to make class war before and during the revolution. The definition of a petty is someone whose class interests are class war, and as long as we have the bougies, we'll have class war, and we'll need more petties on our side than theirs to win it. We need "professional revolutionaries" organized in a centralized, democratic party under the ultimate control of the working class once more to wage class war.

Unlike autocratic Russia, we can organize out in the open. There are plenty of spies from many nations in the socialist parties of the West, and anyone who imagines that their rantings on Leftbook aren't saved in triplicate in some soulless NSA facility in Maryland are deceiving themselves. But even under this capitalist dispensation, we have rights that Lenin's Bolsheviks never did. This changes our material conditions some.

Continue on to Part VI