History, Pedagogy & Revolution

Gramsci, Lenin and Us

Afternoon Comrades.

Both Lenin and Gramsci had notable days over this weekend, for one, Lenin died a 100 years and it was Gramsci’s birthday. Obviously, anyone who has been here for longer than a week knows full well how I feel about them, their work and contribution to the international struggle of liberation and so forth. For those that don’t, I value their contribution immensely.

There is a pivotal thought when it comes to History, learning and how we can work it for us. As important as it is to study the contributions of people such as a Lenin and Gramsci - and make no mistake, it really is - it is equally important to understand what to do with that study. All too often, and I was certainly guilty of this at the beginning of my journey, one can fall into the trap of hero worship and subsequent identitarian behaviour. Logically so, in an existence devoid of almost all authenticity and earned leadership we so desperately want someone, anything to show us the way out of this bullshit. Again, I am not above that. The crucial point about historical figures such as Lenin and Gramsci, but please feel free to apply this everyone, is to be think WITH their ideas. The great contributions these figures gave us are on the one hand, the actual, physical changes they accomplished, illustrating what can be done. Equally important they offered us a methodology of how to get this done. There is absolute no point in following their examples to a T - frankly, that is a recipe for failure as one cannot ever reproduce the the very specific conditions of any given moment and reproduce them today. Dogmatism is an admission of failure and insecurity and has no place in our revolution. Understanding their process and methodology has though - and thus, yes, it is worthwhile noting these dates and these people, but not for meme’s and self-styled propaganda, both are fruitless endeavours of a non existing meme economy.

With that, a a few words about Gramsci and our revolution.

The last 10 years have been pivotal for many of us around the the global north west, in the sense that irrespective of age, our communal radicalization is increasing at an exponential rate. If I look back at what how alone and marginalized I felt 20/21 years ago when this journey started in earnest as an adult, today’s community of the disenfranchised is brighter, bigger, a lot less heteronormative, a lot less white and light years ahead in some aspects than I dare had imagined in my wildest dreams leading up to the days in Seattle in 1999. Of course, this growth comes with challenges, none of which are too hard to handle, as well as disingenuous grifters but again, that’s not really a problem I lose sleep over. What I do lose sleep over is the fact that this growth hasn’t been down to the ground work people like myself have been doing, locally and on the internet but predominately because the capitalistic order of the global north west is in decay and decline, and with that, as always, resorts back to the only mechanism it knows to protect its capital: force and violence.

The last 20 some years since 9/11 have been an utter shit show. Yes, plenty of success’ to talk about in regards to building an alternative new future, but the stark reality is, the loss of privacy, the brutal, violent quantification of everything, including your digital self, the ever increasing pressure of value, wealth, the careless slipping of the system’s mask that upward social mobility through hard honest work is the lie that we have been yelling about for well over 200 years, the wars, the engineered terrorism, the faux boogeyman in post Soviet-Era, let alone the incomprehensible threat of climate change and the seeming undefeatable complex inter-connectivity of the capitalistic system that causes all of this fear, alienation, timidness and anger all are much more responsible for the growth of the disenfranchised than anything we had to offer. Whilst I am not quite ready to admit total failure in our long term strategic planning it is worth reminding myself and yourself of.

But what now? I have been asking myself that for longer than I dare admit with no real solution as of yet. Do we allow a critical mass of disenfranchised to build by itself, grow organized power from below through alternative futures, language and culture ala Gramsci or do we re-imagine a vanguard style leadership scenario ala Lenin that “pushes history” when it is needed?
It is an old, long lasting debate and not one that is going away anytime soon and nor should it. Inherently, I have always leaned more towards the Gramsci / Cultural Hegemonic approach: build power through education, language and culture from below and distrust vanguard politics in the clear understanding that what you are building will most likely not transpire in your lifetime. The counterargument here is that this approach comes from a place of privilege- shit can’t be that bad if you can sit here and work on subverting societies superstructures without a violent shock and take your time. I don’t disagree with that criticism.

The other approach of replacing this violent, oppressive dictatorship of money is by uniting the disenfranchised to a critical mass and by means of violence, and let’s be clear, we are at the very least talking about the threat of murder and / or murder through a small dedicated group of people willing to do what is necessary to literally destroy the people and ideally the structures, mental and physical, that enabled this oppression. Again, the criticism here is that the vanguard approach merely replaces one ruling class with another and again, there is ample historical interpretation to support this argument.

I am not going to bore you with in-depth historical analysis and examples of the above but for those interested I am specifically thinking about the French Revolution ( 1789-1799), the Haitian Revolution ( 1791-1804 ), the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and clearly the Russian Revolution of 1917. Plenty of other historical examples exist but an understanding of these can help - additionally, and also importantly: the Spanish Civil War, the Zapatista Revolution in Mexico and so on. Again, there is plenty.

What I am going to ask though: What in the fuck are we going to do, now? Are these two approaches viable today? Are our societies worth fighting for even? Do we accept our historical destructive nature of the past 500 years and maybe start looking at what other realities of co-existence had existed before we threw our fucked up, binary, christian, racist, sexist system of exploitation over the world? Is it even our place still to want to change the world for better without accepting the above? I don’t have all the answers, far from it but my view of my own impassive non-violent ways have been thoroughly rattled these past few years, again, a logical progression especially considering the past 20 years.

At this point I am willing to throw all of the above into the bag. Cultural Hegemony and violence. A total reckoning, de-construction of of entire physical, mental, cultural being and a global approach to re-imagining modernity. We could be gods, truly, but not the ones we are used to. Fact is, these are questions that need answering immediately, not necessarily because we should be afraid of what immediate dangers we are exposed to in the decaying capitalistic system but predominately because this decaying system is quite literally making our home inhabitable and that at an incredibly increasing speed. That’s the real looming threat here. Immediate dangers can be dealt with immediately, but there is no way other than a revolution to stop the profit driven destruction of our planet comrades, that is what is at stake here.

Food for thought.

Yours, warmly,

V.