Aleka Papariga-On "the unity of the Left" and the KKE alliance politics

Aleka Papariga

From "The Alliance Politics of the KKE and the Critique to 'Left Unity'"

In Contemporary Right-Wing Opportunism, Publication of the CC of the KKE, Synchroni Epohi, Athens 2008.

The purpose of this article is to encode, as much as possible, the objective differences between these two propositions for an alliance [the alliance politics of the KKE and the notion of "Left Unity"]. Alliances, it should be understood, are not based on agreement on terms and slogans or general ideas, but on issues of strategic importance and orientation, on the issue of alternative power.

For the KKE, alliance politics is a permanent, not a conjunctural policy. We struggle to make it materialize, to foreground it and to popularize it, independently of the existence of the subjective preconditions for its materialization at the political level. For the KKE, the creation of an alliance is an issue of struggle, of developments in the correlation of forces, of radical reorderings within political and social consciousness, such that they can bring changes to the composition of the political landscape. Ultimately, the level of the movement will play a determining role in this all-important issue. Of course, we are not simply waiting for possibilities to drop on our hands like overripe fruit. We take initiatives, and first of all we foster dialogue within the people, with radical popular forces, with social agents acting in a positive direction; we follow developments, we try to assist positive trends.

Whose class interests does SYRIZA 2.0 SAY it represents?

Yesterday, and after meeting with representatives of ESEE and GSVEE, the leader of SYRIZA 2.0, aka "Popular Unity", Panayiotis Lafazanis made the following statement, which is very interesting from the standpoint of the kind of class consciousness it represents, and, of course, the class consciousness it addresses and solicits:

Within the context of the mandate I have received from the President of the Republic [as "third Party", despite never having been elected as such], I had the honor to meet two of the greatest Confederations of our country, GSVEE and ESEΕ. It was especially honoring to me that we sat and talked and exchanged views with honesty, for quite some time, I would say. 

It was a meeting of many hours, but also a substantial and productive exchange of views. What I derived from it is of course well-known, but I will repeat. The Memoranda have two great victims in Greece: the first and great victim is of course our youth, which is unfortunately compelled to migrate in order to survive; the second great victim of the Memoranda are medium and small businesses. Medium and small businesses have been placed in the gallows, in the guillotine. With the Memoranda, austerity, tax raiding, lack of cash flow [bank closure was implemented while Lafazanis and other members of "Popular Unity" were in the government cabinet], the robber bank system, which becomes constantly more rapacious, under these conditions, medium and small businesses cannot survive. They have no future whatsoever. And with them, of course, the Greek economy, Greece and the Greek people have no future.

This is not a hoax: Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of cynical hucksterism

From Akis Gavrielides'* "Was Tsipras ultimately a 'populist' who 'reneged on his promises'?"

[...]

As I have already argued in the past, it is time we throw the concepts of promise and acceptance, that is, the concept of a contract, to the garbage bin as tools for the understanding of politics. These are concepts of moral(istic) and legal descent, that don't help us understand the motion of the multitude. It is also time to get rid of an idea with a long past, especially in the discourse of the Left and of social movements: the concept of a demand, and the conception of political discourse as a "plan" that "materializes." Politics is elsewhere; politics doesn't mean that some sovereign subjects meet and delegate to some other, "even more sovereign" subject, the "materialization" or the "satisfaction" of some of their demands [...] This is the scenario of classic bourgeois political philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, based on the model of the market and of contracts.

[...] This schema is desperately inadequate. It can account only for normality, normalcy, accountability -- that is  to say, non politics. Politics is not communication; or at least, it is not, and it is not desirable or possible that it becomes, communication based on rules where all messages are transparent, regulated and distortion-free. Politics is that which escapes, that which is not planned. It is noise, the parasite. What is politically interesting is that which deconstructs, not that which institutes palliative equivalences.

What is "the Left"? Ten remarks

SYRIZA MPs sleeping in Parliament during "fast-track" imposition of the third Memorandum by their Party

What is "the Left"? Ten Remarks

Originally published in Greek, in Lenin Reloaded, 21 June 2014

1. In Greece, "the Left" exists since 1951, and the foundation, during that year, of the United Democratic Left (EDA). As a category of political thinking, it had no significance in the country in the period before the 1950s. "Anarchism" was far more important as a designator of ideology at the beginnings of the Greek worker movement than "the Left" -- not to mention the significance, for an anti-bourgeois politics, of terms like "Bolshevism" and "Third International". Structurally, the precondition for the birth of "the Left" was the self-censorship of the self-designation of a sector of the population as "communist" as a result of state terror. "The Left" is born under conditions of state repression as a defensive misnomer and as a pseudo-apellation for purposes of self-protection.

2. The defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), in combination with state terror and repression, however, also created the preconditions for the pseudo-category of "the Left" (as a nominalist abstraction, rather than as a concrete designator of a tendency within a worker-socialist party -- a use with an entirely different genealogy) to acquire its own substantive meaning. It created, to put it more simply, the possibility for a section of the communists to really (and not just superficially) make the transition to "democratic ideology", which in conditions of unshakeable capitalist domination necessarily means the transition to the side of bourgeois democracy. "The Left" is the product of the effective surrender of a section of the communists to the victorious bourgeois state.

Homo Orientalis, Homo Occidentalis

Syrian refugees, Omonoia Plaza, Athens, 17 July 2015

"The East" is the name of a lie; the lie of the West. Consciousness of the lie is the only path to truth. The East reveals the lie in which western (wo)man lives -- a (wo)man less human the more s/he thinks s/he is human, more than other humans -- a human protected from dehumanization, the deprivation of human identity, because s/he is white and "civilized." The East reveals the need of the western (wo)man for the lie, their identification with the lie. The foundation of the lie is the belief that exploitation does not poison consciousness; that there is a "spontaneous" expression that is not based on exploitation within societies dominated by capitalist relations of production. The western (wo)man is the one who benefits from the fruit of such exploitation but refuses to acknowledge it. It is the (wo)man  who has forgotten the East, does not wish to know about the East, and yet pretends to "know" what exploitation is. The western (wo)man is the one who may accept debating capitalism but does not wish to speak of imperialism. Because for that (wo)man, "capitalism" is not something that concerns the East, that is baptized in its blood; its protagonist and its victim, western (wo)man believes, is, once again, western (wo)man. Like imperialism, western (wo)man is a parasitic entity dreaming of being the universal subject: dreaming that his/her fantasy is reality, his/her desires are a moral law, the satisfaction of their Ego a moral demand, their pleasure the historical end justifying the means of martyrdom for others. The world, which is not western (wo)man, will keep turning into hell for as long as every human being does not rebel against the infamy of being "western" -- nothing more than western.

What would the KKE do if it were in SYRIZA's place?

What would the KKE do if it were in SYRIZA's place?

Rizospastis, 19 July 2015

We often hear the following, well-intentioned question: "What would you have done if you were in the place of the SYRIZA government"?

The question is not illogical. But we must place it in the right perspective.

If we, the KKE, were in the "place" of SYRIZA, meaning the place of bourgeois management, the place of defending capitalist interests, in search of winning back profits, seeking to use the advantages conferred on capital by membership in the EU, the EZ and Euroatlantic alliances and NATO; if we were in the "place" of taking up a government that is a tool of the power of monopolies; if we were in the "place" of negotiating on behalf of Greek capitalism by sitting in the roundtables of the EU, the EZ and other imperialist organizations;

The poisonous politics of SYRIZA's Left Platform

"It is both them who are at fault!" SPD Poster, 1932.

The KKE has long argued that the role of the Left Platform is not at all, as it has pretended, to "radicalize" SYRIZA, or, in another of its formulations, to "pressure it to the Left", but rather to: a) bolster illusions that this is possible and even desirable for SYRIZA and the Left Platform itself; b) hence, prevent those who buy into the illusion from making a real left turn toward KKE; c) assist in the overall effort to create a fracture within the KKE -- hence regularly hosting and promoting those who have been expelled from the KKE in more recent years, including venomously anti-KKE initiatives like "Ergatikos Agwnas" (Labor Struggle), as well as other, increasingly anti-KKE formations like ANTARSYA, in a broad "more left than SYRIZA, but still anti-KKE" alliance.

On heroism

The following text was written by a Greek comrade, Stergios, as a comment to one of my posts back in 2010. The title here is mine, as is the translation to English.

***

My sensitivity to your text derives from your words: "when I was young, I thought revolutionaries were special people". I don't remember where and how I published what I am drawing on in my response. It is an extract from a larger, unpublished text I wrote on the basis of a conversation I had with my son (I showed him your post and he smiled, pleased) years ago. That conversation had to do exactly with what your post discusses, the idealist and the dialectic conception of heroism. My son underestimated the struggles of his own generation (on the basis of their results) and thought that "he has done nothing", while for my generation, of the 1960s and 70s, he thought everything was marvelous... "but, you were heroes", he told me!!!

My reaction to this was an immediate dialectical analysis of heroism in its fully human dimension, in contradistinction with the idealist conception of heroism, which regards heroism as something superhuman. The point of my whole argument was that heroism is a possibility in us as we are. 

Axiomatic

Carl Schmitt

The pseudoelevation of problems specific to politics (that is, problems specific to the organization of relations of production and their political mediation) to problems of "ontology", "ethics", and "philosophy" is in fact a drastic measure against radical political thought, a measure of demoting the revolutionary significance such problems might otherwise obtain. The investment of politics with a false theoretical dignity (in the form of endless philosophical pomp) is in fact a thoroughly counter-revolutionary measure, invented in the twentieth century by Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt and propagated by a host of supposedly "leftist" acolytes of the idea of the "primacy" and the "autonomy" of "the political", however hypostatized (ethically, ontologically, pseudo-anthropologically, "structurally", etc): Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriades, Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau, to name but a few. That most of these neo-Aristotelian propagators of the "dignity of the political" were expressly anti-communist is anything but an accident; it was precisely such "dignity" that was explosively refuted by Marx's demonstration of the impotence of a merely "political" emancipation when the question is that of exploitation and inequality within so-called "civil society" -- the sphere where "Man" is not a "political" being but one defined by painful need and the competition for resources. Nor is it accidental that Marx demolished centuries of Platonic and Aristotelian thinking in a youthful essay ostensibly written "On the Jewish Question": the "Jew" was his own time's antisemitic synonym for what, bound as it is to the despised and enslaved world of "matter", cannot ascend to the Olympian realm of the "dignity of the political." After him, the insistence on ignoring his rigorous de-construction of bourgeois political self-heroicization could not but take the form of an anti-Semitism that could for some time forego explicit reference to the "dirty Jew" by haughtily castigating the "external determination of the political" via "concerns that do not belong to it" (cf Schmitt, The Concept of the Political); after Schmitt, the reaction against every and all effort to demystify the philosophizing mystique around "the political" could continue only by proclaiming its unwillingness to see through the genocidally fascist implications of a position for which only those willing to "risk their being" are entitled with the right to comprehend the decidedly Occidental arcana of bourgeois "political freedom" (cf Arendt's regression to Aristotelian hypostatizations of slave-owning "freedom" and "autonomy" against Marx's "economism" in The Human Condition).

Sectarian blues

Given the fact that "sectarianism" originates in the study of religious factions and the violence that sometimes characterizes their attitude to antagonistic groups, it's supremely ironic but no less revealing how the term is used by political ideologues of the "New Left" today: the position that capitalism is, as an economic system, subject to a number of laws that cannot be bent or changed at will or by fiat of "good intentions" is the primary target of accusations of "sectarianism." One is "sectarian" because one is indiscrete enough to remind others that "democracy" is as much the alternative to capitalism as scissors are an alternative to computers; it is "sectarian" to not pretend to ignore that a form of political administration can never be an "alternative" to a system of organizing production (which is why the slaveholding US of the American Revolution, for instance, was certainly anything but less "democratic" than its postbellum industrial or its post 1890s imperialist counterparts). It is "sectarian" to not pretend to ignore that "distributive justice" is severely limited by the determinate form of specific relations of production and can never transcend them. It is "sectarian" to remind others that "justice" itself is never independent of these relations as far as its actual content is concerned. It is "sectarian" to insist that an economy founded and regulated by the law of competition can never be changed as regards its nature and consequences by not wearing ties or by proclaiming the rights of transgendered persons, or by espousing ecological causes. It is "sectarian" to not pretend ignorance at the fact that a falling rate of profit can only be recouped through the intensification of the exploitation of labor or through the destruction of forces of production. And it is "sectarian" to argue against the possibility of a "conciliation" between labor and capital that does not take the form of the submission of the former but is somehow achieved through the good offices and dialogical finesse of an "open minded" and "impartial" enough Left government.

In short, "sectarianism" consists in the proclamation of the existence of regulatory laws specific to the economic realm which are not suspended or abolished by personal ethics, appealing posters, catchy slogans and heartfelt speeches, and which shape the form of imaginable political practices. It is a derisive word for "respect for science", which becomes unpalatable when it makes visible necessities the petty bourgeoisie wishes to obfuscate and mystify (sometimes, through the crackpot positing of some imaginary Quantum law of political and historical "indeterminacy"). "Sectarian" are those who refuse to invest petty bourgeois placebos and fetishes with the magical efficacy the petty bourgeoisie demands. They are precisely those who refuse to proclaim their faith to the regressively religious, pseudo-transcendental heart-on-its-sleeve mode of responding to reality that masquerades as "ethics", "philosophy", and "politics" today.

The SYRIZA infomercial

An infomercial is a shamefaced commercial, whose shamefacedness compels it to appear as presentation of "information" in order to sell a product more effectively. It is therefore a fusion of two genres of discourse that is at the same time a pseudo-fusion: the discourse of "information" is merely a carapace, whose purpose is to protect and reinforce the discourse of advertising.

Writing on politics, traditionally another genre of discourse than informercials, generally falls under two categories: journalistic writing, whose characteristic is the production of the illusion of a reporting "objectivity", and explicitly political writing, characterized by a more explicit foregrounding of the writer's own political principles and ideas. 

Marxist political writing is by its nature the most explicit of the subgenres of political writing: since Marxism is, among other things, a critique of the dominant ideology, ideological presuppositions, both on the side of the writer and on the side of that which the writer discusses and argues for or against, must be visible and consciously expressed.

My argument here is that a great deal of the writing that postures as political writing, and even --implicitly or explicitly-- affiliates itself with Marxist political writing these days is in fact an instance of the extension of the discourse of the infomercial in the arena of political expression. It is, additionally, that, at least when it comes to international writing on Greek politics, this is nowhere more frequent than in writing on SYRIZA, whether as a rising political force, or, since 25 January, as a government partner.

Giorgos Stamatis-The economic crisis and the delusions concerning its overcoming (Pt. 2)

Pt. 1.

The measures recommended by capitalists and by governments in order to overcome the crisis, i.e., low wages, the funding and privileging of production and of investments, tax deductions for profit and cuts in the social spending of the Public sector, increase profit or even the rate of profit beyond any measure of doubt, but they do not contribute to the reduction of unemployment, whether by increasing the rate of capital employment or by increasing investment. For they do not increase either of these two. This is because the underemployment of capital means that demand is low when compared to the production potential of the given capital. So, as long as demand remains low, capitalists will not increase their investment. The measures I cited above do not increase either the rate of the employment of capital or the investments, or the employment of the labor force; they only increase profit. 

But it is said that increased profit means increase of investments and thus increase of the employment of the labor force. This is incorrect. For capitalists invest only when the expected future demand and expected future profit is high, not when the profits of one or more years are high as a result of state funding, tax deductions and low wages rather than of increased demand.

Giorgos Stamatis-The economic crisis and the delusions concerning its overcoming (Pt. 1)

Giorgos Stamatis

The economic crisis and the delusions concerning its overcoming

Theseis 15, April-June 1986

Translation: In Defense of Greek Workers

The economic crisis that is hitting capitalist countries today broke out in the beginning of the 1970s. It is therefore well into its second decade.

I will not here deal with its causes, but with certain of its aspects that I think are of particular interest.

The crisis itself was initially expressed in the form of a decrease of the rate of the employment of labor, that is to say, in the form of an increase of unemployment; and in the form of the decrease of the rate of the employment of capital. The decrease in the rate of employment of labor and of capital had stagnation as their immediate consequence, and sometimes also resulted in the decrease of the GNP.

According to the view and practice that was dominant until the end of the 1960s, governments in such cases must respond through an anti-cyclical policy, i.e. they must implement measures to increase demand for local products; the most important of these measures is the increase of public spending itself. This policy is known as the Keynesian policy of fighting the economic crisis. But in this case, in the case of the crisis that began in the 1970s, it was as if what was taken for granted was exactly the opposite: the former supporters of Keynesian economic policy suddenly advocated a pro-cyclical policy of cutting public spending, especially of social spending, and of reducing demand, while governments did their best to apply an "austerity" policy, as it became known [1].

"Let's save capitalism now, we can have socialism later": Don't consume after expiry date

Lapavitsas, state-of-the-art "socialism" in 2015:

Let me come clean on this. Keynes and Keynesianism, unfortunately, remain the most powerful tools we’ve got, even as Marxists, for dealing with issues of policy in the here and now. The Marxist tradition is very powerful in dealing with the medium-term and longer-term questions and understanding the class dimensions and social dimensions of economics and society in general, of course. There’s no comparison in these realms.

But, for dealing with policy in the here and now, unfortunately, Keynes and Keynesianism remain a very important set of ideas, concepts, and tools even for Marxists. That’s the reality. Whether some people like to use the ideas and not acknowledge them as Keynesian is something I don’t want to comment upon, but it happens.

So I cannot blame Varoufakis for that, for associating himself with Keynesians, because I’ve also associated myself with Keynesians, openly and explicitly so. If you showed me another way of doing things, I’d be delighted. But I can assure you, after many decades of working on Marxist economic theory, that there isn’t at the moment. So yes, Varoufakis has worked with Keynesians. But that isn’t really, in and of itself, a damning thing.

Greek Paradoxes: Anti-German chauvinism and the gestation of fascism in the "Anti-Memorandum block", 2010-2012

Spring of 2010: the first Memorandum is introduced in Greece by then PM George Papandreou (Jr). The Greek political imagination goes wild with a persistent and impeccably orchestrated fantasy: this is not about capitalism, it's not about imperialism and the Greek bourgeoisie's bonds with EU finance capital. This is an enemy attack, the "new German Occupation". Germans are all Nazis, the Greek government is a Nazi collaborator that wishes to "Germanify" us, and the issue is the formation of a "new EAM", a purely "patriotic" one, which the traitorous KKE refused to undertake, arguing that this ain't 1941, that Greek capitalism was not "dragged" anywhere against its will, and that it's not interested in "unifying all the real Greeks against the Germans and their local collaborators" but in national class struggle.

So the heroic mantle falls on the muscular shoulders of the "anti-Memorandum alliance": a melange of wild-eyed SYRIZA Social Democrats believing themselves Maoists, extreme right wing crackpots, social media enthusiasts and sundry petty bourgeois remnants of decaying PASOK and ND clientelism, who coagulated into a political movement in 2011, in the framework of the "Greek Indignados".

Some months later, Golden Dawn had gone up from 0.29% in 2009 to 6.92% in June 2012 (a 2386% increase), real rather than photoshopped swastikas and Storm Troops filled the streets of Athens, and the pogroms against immigrants and communists were unleashed through the hot summer. Another part of the recent Greek story no one wishes to remember, but one which reveals volumes about the organicism of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition and explains the current, ludicrous remnants of showcase "anti-Germanism": bread and circuses for brain-washed masses who were duped into supporting the "real patriots" against the "fake" ones. The "healthy --and healthily patriotic-- business interests" must after all still be saved...

Transitional PM Papadimos as a Nazi, from a "left" anti-Memorandum blog, 2012

Fun Learning: What does SYRIZA understand by the word "socialism"?

After the NATO installment, we move to a different question that arose in Greece and abroad: namely, what is SYRIZA's view of socialism? Does SYRIZA proclaim itself a socialist party, and if so, in what sense? What, ultimately, does it mean by "socialism"? Let's review some of the answers party cadres gave since 2009:

1. Socialism is a superior socioeconomic system in comparison to capitalism. It is based on the concentration of means of production and distribution, which smashes the obstacles set to the development of productive forces by capitalist ownership and by production with the profit motive. This socialization will eliminate the capitalist anarchy of production and will render possible the planning of the economy for the benefit of the working social whole. SYRIZA Communist Tendency Contribution to the Party Program, May 2013
 

2. To us, socialism is a form of the organization of society which is based on social --not state-- ownership, and the admininistration of the means of production, while requiring democracy in all the cells and jointures of public life, so that workers can plan, direct, control and protect production through their elected organs, directing it to the satisfaction of social needs. At the same time, however, socialism is not for us a copy of models that have attempted to ground themselves in such ideas, but ended up misinterpreting them, distorting them, and finally, for many and complex reasons, self-destructing. Foundational Declaration of SYRIZA, July 2013

Is there a class in this text?

"The comparative lack of elaboration concerning the matrix of political and economic challenges of today is in part the result of the absence of academics from the environs of the KKE. This is something SYRIZA inherited from Synaspismos, where there was always space for the coexistence of Keynesianism and Marxism. The crisis, the organizational involvement of Synaspismos with social movements, made the theoretical arsenal of the new party even more prosperous [sic].  On the contrary, in the KKE, the absence of any relation to the new centers of reaction against austerity guaranteed the continuation of the existing ideological arsenal."

George Charalambous, Red Notebook (SYRIZA Website). Trans. Lenin Reloaded. 

Below, a recent sample of the "absence of any relation to the new centers of reaction against austerity" in KKE, 1 November 2014. 1000 Unions, 100,000 workers. Took 3 weeks to organize.

Invisible Aspects of Opportunism: Semioticization

As is the case more broadly in postmodernism, the history of the communist movement is transformed for opportunism into an object of semiotic cannibalism. Cannibalism is of central importance for the semiotic politics of opportunism: anthropologically, it is part of the triumph over a defeated opponent; similarly, the opportunistic cannibalization of the communist past is a sign of triumph over historical communism. At the same time, cannibalism is a means of "incorporating" the communist Other, transforming him/her into something harmless and manipulable. Cannibalism is both murder and mourning over murder, an attempt to retain the trace of the now harmless dead as a "souvenir" -- hence the horrifying cannibalistic habit of retaining "souvenirs" of victims -- shrunken heads, teeth, hair, etc. Similarly, in opportunism's own semiotic cannibalism, communist history is "mourned" as a trophy, as a violently disjointed memory of a now dismembered (precisely into "signs") body (remember the exemplary anticommunist "trophy" of the 90s, a piece from the Berlin wall). Like actual cannibalism, semiotic cannibalism suggests both sadistic violence and imaginary identification with the object of this violence (I transform the Other, whom I swallow, into myself), and hence its character is both sadistic and narcissistic: it is an extreme form of simultaneous hatred for the Other and narcissistic libido so intense that it transforms this hated Other into a part of one's  own Ego.

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.

"Without illusions"

"Without illusions"*: The combination of cynicism and stupidity has found its new slogan in the lips of those who deceive others while reassuring them that they themselves are not deceived; or rather, those who effectively argue that they promote deception only because others have already been deceived -- to keep them company in delusion, as it were.

For mass delusion appears as the second best option after mass class consciousness, and certainly as something far better than minority class consciousness: mass delusion is "mass", so it morphologically resembles half the character of the revolutionary consciousness of which it is admittedly a parody.