Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults, Part VI

The high education levels of the petty bourgeois class traitorate open a yet-unimagined weapon to our leftist ranks. Levels of class consciousness in the Bolsheviks were minor; the petty class traitorate formally understood the theoretical foundations of Soviet power, and generations of Soviet students could probably recite it by rote. But the level of theoretical education was not great enough to prevent careerists lawyering it all the way to state power, much like petty Leftbook wokelords do now with their callout/cancel culture. So when revisionists like Khrushchev came to power, there were not enough working-class communists left who were both competent in theory and daring enough to stand by it in the face of these machinations.

This is merely to say that there was not enough democracy in the Communist Party in the Soviet Union; the workers were forced by tsarist repression to delegate their interests and power to a class that ultimately betrayed them under Trotsky and Khrushchev. Here's some heuristic aphoristic apologetics for that: knowledge is power; no investigation, no right to speak. The people had not investigated the aspirants for power because Lenin's government had assured them they were good Bolsheviks. Without investigation, they had no knowledge; without a right to speak, they had no power. The democratic forms of the Soviet Union were prostituted towards the opportunist ends of Khrushchev. Stalin had tried to refound the Soviet state along democratic worker lines, but was probably assassinated by Beria before the project could be completed, and the middle class careerist expedients he had been forced to use to thwart Trotsky took control instead.

I am not an anti-Stalin voice; I do not think one can be a Marxist-Leninist and not uphold at least the basic thrust of what Stalin was trying to do. But because one can hardly have real democracy in wartime, or when fighting ruthless and disingenuous petty opponents like the Trotsky-ultraradical combination, and because the Soviet Union was always on some level of cold or hot war, Bolshevik democratic norms were shelved in Stalin's era to protect the workers' state. This unified the Soviet Union so it could beat Hitler, but the lack of democracy in the end corroded the internal politics of the USSR and led to vacuous careerists like Khrushchev taking the reins. There was always this risk by putting the Party and the country in the hands of part of the middle class and praying they weren't lying when they said they were class traitors. Some of them inevitably must have been lying, simply because human nature cannot permit uniform perfection in any social sphere. And without vigorous internal Party democracy, those liars and opportunists rose like scum from the broth.

But we have an opportunity ourselves, in this refounding of the great socialist experiment, afforded us by the mistakes of our petty-bourgeois enemies. In their capitalist striving, they made welfare as palatable to that striving as possible, and accidentally created a host of potential class traitors among themselves. They also raised the education levels of the working class itself, the most dangerous part of these educational reforms. The creation of class traitors in large numbers have led to successful Marxist-Leninist revolution in the past, so we know this is a good development. But this creation of an educated base of actual workers for our cause means that we do not have to trust a Party hierarchy as the Bolsheviks once did, we do not have to put the same kind of trust in our leadership to do our thinking for us that the feudal peasants of Russia once did or that Democrat voters still do.

We can, and we must, put the tool of class analysis in the hands of every prole. Knowing these three basic classes, and how they have interacted with one another in the past, and knowing that just about all social relations are fundamentally reducible to how they impact on relations between these three classes, you can simply and meaningfully analyze the world. The difference between class consciousness and false consciousness is like night and day: like studying evolution instead of believing in creationism, or knowing how the Egyptians built the Pyramids instead of believing stoned liars on the History Channel who swear aliens did it. There is a fundamental power imbalance between people who class analyze society and those who don't, because knowledge is power and this is the most fundamental knowledge. The only way the purveyors of false consciousness can counterbalance the strength of our knowledge is by owning most of the papers, corporations, and guns.

Class analysis is a lot like chess. The moves of six types of pieces on 64 squares is similarly simple to grasp, yet in the intricacies of that simplicity lay an entire pastime. And like chess, it is incredily simple to learn how class analysis works, and how to do it. But once learned, some find it impossible to stop. In its deceptive simplicity lies all the complexity and secrets of the whole world; a sort of "theory of everything" for the social sciences. And also like chess, it can be done by laymen and grand masters alike.

It is fundamental that every worker and petty class traitor be able to independently class analyze anything they set their minds to. With that skill, the proles and their allies can dismember bourgeois lies in public, and hold socialist leadership to account. The history of socialism demonstrates that just as much danger lay in counterrevolution against an established socialist state as lay in revolution against an established capitalist state. With class analysis in the hands of toiling masses who vote for their leaders, counterrevolution will be impossible because deceiving the masses will be impossible.

On to Chapter 2!