antipopper

Shane is right about “panty-raiders” as the proto-revolutionary cadre. This is exactly what happened in France, too — dormitory curfews at Nanterre sparked May ’68. Now this has always been the crux of my beef with neo-Leninist approaches to cadre-building, which is all poxy demands of the state, made in manipulative bad faith from a bunker housing a government-in-waiting. As if that’s going to get the masses pumping.

But the answer to this is not to logically present a totalisingly coherent analysis of the world, which the enlightened masses will then “obviously” choose. (Noam Chomsky, go away.) This was the position the ISO ascribed to Ben Ross back in the ’90s, noting that the demands which sparked May ’68 weren’t about a refined analysis of capital flight, but were all about dormitories. It’s amazing that they could recognise this and yet totally miss the point, seeing this instrumentally as a way of manipulating panicked people with reactive and relatively conservative rhetoric as a precursor to revolutionary indoctrination once they’ve been recruited. How infinitely crap. The point about dormitories is that it’s about power and everyday life. I mean, to me, kicking against the repressive pricks is objectively more radical than pressuring the the left of the left of the ALP to pressure the rest of the ALP to pressure the Liberal Party to not be so over the top in their implementation of a border protection policy that the ALP Left first implemented.

This kind of historical misperception by Leninists goes back to their own founding mythologies. At their core — in their lived expression by people at large — the demands for PEACE, BREAD and LAND during the 1917 Revolution were not a dishonest and rhetorical policy of reformist manipulation, though no doubt it did fit nicely into Bolshevik opportunism. Rather, in the wake of Tsarism and in the middle of World War I, those things were an immediate necessity for simply living everyday life, let alone a just life, and the Russian provisional government was clearly not going to provide any of those things. Any Leninists in the “free the refugees” campaign who try to justify cozying up to the bastards who started mandatory detention by implicitly citing “Peace, Bread, Land” as an example “non-revolutionary demands leading towards revolutionary ends” are clearly in a state of absolute delusion. This reduction of the revolutionary materialities of the fabric of life and dealth to some excuse for political jockeying is not just mistaken and ineffectual, it insults the desires of working people — in the Russia of 1917, and in the here and now.

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Am enjoying Kylie’s Body Language. Much of it doesn’t go quite far enough into the wonderful, abstract electrotude of “Slow”, but bits are fun.

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Received my first cheque from CafePress, which was weird. I sold those Magento Was Right t-shirts for no profit at the Antipopper Store, but CafePress apparently gave me a bonus for the volume of sales, anyway. I feel all guilty’n'shit.