Saturday, February 21, 2015

2+2=5: A Lexicon of Greek Ideological Discourse, 2009-15

Adapted from text published in Greek, Lenin Reloaded, 7 February 2013



Anti-Stalinism=The conviction that because it is theoretically better than fascism, communism is also practically worse, since it committed equally great crimes. Consequently, the silent preference for fascism over communism. 
Autonomy=The ability of capital to automatically adjust every facet of social life.
Constitutional Arc=The spectrum of political parties guaranteeing submission to the ruling class.
Dignity=The means of rationalizing and embellishing mass submission to the power of capital.
Dogmatism=The condition of having a conscience and principles.
European Family=The Boards of multinationals based on European Union countries; the network of finance and political institutions of European imperialism.
Freedom=The right of capital to expand spatially and over social relations.
Front (of the Left)=A form of electoral collaboration aiming at maximizing the occupation of well-paying parliamentary posts.
Hegemony (Left wing)=The unconditional surrender of the New Left to the terms and interests of the bourgeoisie.
Isolationism=The refusal to participate in shady deals between political demagogues.
Legality=Conformity to the power of capital in the legal sphere.
Movement (Social)=A collective form of activism aimed at obscuring the class character of society, usually funded by other nation-states and their secret services, by corporations and by NGOs.
Negotiation=A form of legitimating what has already been decided through the media cultivation of delusional suspense.
Obsolescence=The common feature of all theoretical ideas that actually defend the working class and teach it how to fight for its interests.
Patriotism=What is left to the masses as a specter of the "popular" after the elimination of class consciousness.
Postmodern, postmodernism=The totality of modes of thought after the end of hopes for human emancipation.
Radical change=The loss of working class rights in a specific sector or in all sectors; alternatively, a rhetorical equation of thin air with objective reality.
Rationalization (in economic planning)=The demolition of obstacles to capital accumulation.
Renewal=The invigoration of dominant ideology through its fusion with a rhetoric that appears to resist it.
Responsible Government=A government that is committed to the responsibility of the working class to yield profit to the bourgeoisie.
Radical Leftism=The preference for a different bourgeois government than the current one.
Realism=Renegacy that has successfully rid itself of guilt.
Restructuring=The demolition of obstacles to the functional totalization of a system of exploitation.
Scholasticism (sterile)=Paying attention to the actual meaning of words, defending concepts from distortion.
Second Coming (socialism of the)=The belief that socialism is actually possible in contemporary society.
Sectarianism=The belief in your ideas, accompanied by the lack of willingness to prostitute them in the interests  of bourgeois ideology.
Social Cohesion=The lack of protest or reaction against social injustice.
Sovietism=Keynesianism, state intervention of any form, the welfare state, state ownership of any form.
Totalitarianism=The idea that social life under capitalism is a structured whole whose change has to be thorough and radical, or it cannot really be conceived as a "change" at all.
Unity=The cultivation of divisions within the working class, so that it can be replaced by the collaboration of its self-appointed representatives with the bourgeoisie.
Violence=The obstruction of the freedom of movement of capital and of its right to shape social life and social relations in their entirety.

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