Dyscommunicationfrom Society of the Spectacle
https://chi.st/dyscommunication/from-society-of-the-spectacle
Luther Blissett@dyscommunication #SocietyoftheSpectacle
'When Lukács, in 1923, presented ... [the Bolshevik form of organization] as the long-sought link between theory and practice, in which proletarians cease being mere "spectators" of the events that occur in their organization and begin consciously choosing and experiencing those events, he was describing as merits of the Bolshevik Party everything that that party was not.' (Thesis 112, p 58)
'Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), Russian Bolshevik leader, creator of the Red Army and most powerful figure in the "Soviet" regime except for Lenin. Following Lenin's death in 1924, he was gradually outmaneuvered by Stalin, forced into exile, and later murdered by one of Stalin's agents. the second Russian revolution: i.e. the 1917 revolution (the first being in 1905). During the earlier period Trotsky maintained an independent position between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks; he only rallied to the Bolshevik Party in 1917 (at the same time that Lenin, in turn, adopted Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution).' (Note 112, p 136)
'The proletariat ... consists of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves as the proletariat, the force working to negate this society from within. This proletariat is being objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination of the peasantry and by the increasing degree to which the "service" sectors and intellectual professions are being subjected to factorylike working conditions. Subjectively, however, this proletariat is still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes not only for white-collar workers but also for blue-collar workers, who have yet to become aware of any perspective beyond the impotence and deceptions of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the constant reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor but also in the form of the labor unions, political parties, and state powers that it had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified externalizations and all specializations of power. It bears a revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution. No quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life.' (Thesis 114, pp 60–61) #SocietyoftheSpectacle
'the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong . . . real life: Cf. Marx's Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which describes the proletariat as "a sector that has a general character because its sufferings are general, a sector that does not claim any particular right because the wrong it suffers is not any particular wrong but a general wrong."' (Note 114, p 136)