My will is easy to decide...

My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide,
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan
Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.
My body? Ah, If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will,
Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill

Joe Hill went on to make that famous claim that "Don't waste any time mourning - organize!" As so many other adages, maxims and sayings from the working class, it feels more appropriate now than perhaps for a long time before.

As for organization there seems to be two extreme lines that are both problematic, one is ultra-puritan, hiding behind vulgar Leninism or ultra mass line, and the other is an upturn-everything social network from below style. Neither seems very appropriate. First of all, Lenin's "What is to be Done?" is a text that above all handles the Russian situation in 1903 (and forward, it could be argued) and while it contains important lessons, it is not appropriate for any movement at any time. Neither is, I believe, Gramscis idea of mobile against immobile warfare (where open class warfare was in the Russian revolution, and during more peaceful, parliamentary instances, we should act like Social Democrats and attempt to become hegemonic). Attempting to fight on the battlefield that someone else chooses is a remarkably bad idea: in the epoch of television and the decline of Left media in general, we find that we are facing an uphill battle (at best). What we require is militancy. More on this later.

To go on to Gramsci, however, he does have an excellent point. To borrow an analogy from another Marxist, the Party is like a great school. The activists and members of the Party are taught and educated communally to form a collective vision and learn to articulate it and become allround activists. Some are better suited to teaching, some are agitators, some are politicians, some are activists of one stripe or the other. The teaching of cadres to lead and educate the working class, to explain, and to have in turn situations explained to them is essential to build an organization strong enough to take on the entire burgeoise, complete with it's state, it's media, it's repressive functions. Every activist, every cadre, needs a basic education in political work and theory to be able to communicate it to people outside the Party and to keep on a living democratic tradition as well as the necessary discipline required.

One of the most important things Lenin says is that there is no political (that is to say, social) arena that is closed to us. It is a matter of tactics, not morality. As I have argued before, however, I believe that there is always a moral dimension, but hardly one that is of the type of the tribal taboos of Christian morality with it's do's and don't's, far away from any meaningful substance.

Perhaps the most problematic in the context of much of the post-Soviet Left is that we do not dare to move towards the revolution. It is an important choice for us to always have the revolution as our ultimate goal, and as we can remember, whoever wills the end also wills the means.

Thus militant struggle needs to be resumed (or even just started), fronts built, cadres educated and a choice must be made somewhere to go from hesitating to advancing. No revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. To paraphrase a more contemporary political figure: "We have refugees to hide, municipal meetings to be bored through, pamphlets handed out in their thousands... we don't just want bread, but roses, too".

To conclude this Leninist litany with a few defensive remarks:

Morality is included in the revolutionary struggle itself, as all human activities are political, so are they also moral. The categories have become reificated and meaningless. What is political is social. The burgeoise of the past have heaped derision, surprise and worse (and continue to do so) against the revolutionary proletariat, and particularly it's organized form, for it's lack of morality. Perhaps it's lack of burgeoise morality, the truth is that it is a far more profound moral choice to be a political activist, a revolutionary than it was ever to be burgeoise. Certainly, bad things happen and have happened in the class struggle, even from the proletariat, and it needs to be avoided. But capitalism, sexism and racism are structures and systems that simply cannot be accepted by anyone calling themselves the least bit ethical. As Lukács understood: when we at last face, with sober senses, our fellow men we will be compelled to act.

Furthermore, ultra-puritanism is contra-productive. With the Left splintered and everything changing, we need new tactics and new alliances. That is not to say to throw everything overboard, but rather, that the far Left must unite. Syndicalist, parts of the anarchist movement that is still involved in the class struggle, communist, trotskyist, socialist.. even Social Democratic. Perhaps the most pathetical political theatre is that of the inexperienced political activist staging again arguments and quarrels from fifty, or a hundred years ago that were held in a context that was then meaningful and today is more ridiculous. Again, Lenin, from his best work, the State and the Revolution - no alliance, no tactic, is wrong unless it works against the long-time strategy or the short-time tactic. A warning remark to a text that is certainly making more than a few people wince, or believe that I am some sort of Stalinist apologist - the class struggle is by necessity a democratic such, that by it's own necessity organizes the proletariat on perfectly equal terms and cannot ever lift the burden of political struggle without equal rights for all, incarnated in actual praxis, rather than the abstract of liberal human rights - an index that is completely subject to change and political hegemony.