Fed Up with Rhetoric; Finished with Polemic (A Defence of the Necessity of Reform-Leninism)

21 August 2025.

This article, it ought to be made clear from the opening, is a rant, and a rant born of decommissioning illness, nay less. Howbeit, I hope to address and further expand the ideological basis, experience, and analysis which has for the past four years been culminating into the revolutionary renewal named Reform-Leninism. If just one comrade is inspired by this article to take hold of the Sacred Lenin Banner of Reform, then the article will have been justified.

The initial thing to be said is that rhetoric and polemic are being used, ironically or hypocritically, in a rhetorical and polemical fashion. Nay such iron theoretical grounding shall anchor the terms of these in this article. I could just as easily have elected to speak about dogma, orthodoxy, or to really cover myself in the vague draperies of polemical rhetoric, Partyclost.

I am here to denounce the Left on the charge of betraying its right mandate. Is that not fundamentally what Reform-Leninism is seeking to redress? The various parties and tendencies of the Left have made many promises and boastings which they could not keep. Perhaps it will be told that it is unjust for comrades to have expected anything else in these conditions of capitalist empire. I tire to the boards of the bed in these vanguardist, ultra-Hegelian, determinist, and dogmatist refrains.

The prime principle driving Reform-Leninism is very simple. It is the exhortation of Vladimir Ilyich that we dare to dream. Perhaps the two-faced jackals of the radical-nothings schools which predominate the left are paralysed with fear (incompetence!), but we Reform-Leninists dare to not, in accordance with the instruction of Comrade Lenin and basic mannish sanity.

If communists cannot shape moulds from the clay around them, then truly, we are incompetent, too incompetent to be given any further mandate over society. This, I suspect, is in fact the majority view of the Left. What we have amongst us, then, is a tiny, pitiful were it not also petty, Menshevik Left.

Since which time, if I may be permitted to ask, did revolutionary dreaming and honest enquiry become anathema to the Party Line, and indeed, a counter-revolutionary crime? How long did we honestly think such a state of intellectual stasis was going to be able to last? Though the dogmatists detest these revolutionary break-throughs, Reform-Leninism was in hind-sight, more or less, an inevitability. I may not be the best, most dedicated, most perceptive representative, but someone was eventually going to pick up the down-fallen Lenin Banner of Reform; granted, perhaps someone who was stupid enough to try. Here am I.

Reform-Leninism is not one project: it is an ideological renewal with many such projects under its guise and guidance. All the various constructions, as they continue to tower, will fufil the plan of Reform-Leninism. The exact structure, and potentially the nature, of the Reform-Leninist ideology cannot now be completely elucidated, nor ought it to be. The revolutionary intellectual impulse and the stabilising needs of the Folk will through dialogue determine the ultimate trajectory and codification of Reform.

To my hard-line Marxist-Leninist comrades (and any Hoxhaists that come out of their bunkers of dogma), I offer this comradely reconciliation in the spirit of Gladsnost: your critique, too, shall have its impact on the shape and scope of Reform. The final object of Reform-Leninism is to codify its successful, useful aims and projects into the renewed dialectical science of the century, Reformed Marxism-Leninism, whose triumph must be the successful beginning of the outline for Reformed Communism. But this science is not immortal. If the Marxist-Leninists sufficiently prove the erroneous foundations of Reform-Leninism, then they should have done so upon a proper Reform-Leninist basis, and that is all we can ask.

Let me suggest, in defence of Reform-Leninism, that the Left being so small and insignificant, specially that part located in the sprawling, rather lethargic and inert, US Federal Empire, is in one sense an advantage. Nay vanguard party stands remotely capable of holding influence, were it not for 'dissenters and deviationists' of myriad forms. This presents the Left with the rare opportunity to experiment in (relative) peace and autonomy. We have seen in Parisian, Soviet, and Chinese history the negative retardations which occur, often accompanied by the beforcement of dogmatic, even arbitrary standards through mass violence (terror, yezhovshchina, so on), when experimentation is eschewed and withheld until after the revolution. Let us not be so stupid as to repeat this tragedy, to squander this unique opportunity; dare to dream as Vladimir Ilyich instructed.

All of us became communists for a reason, but if the truth of that reason is lost, it is our duty as communists to rediscover or reconstruct it. For we are not cynical post-modern deconstructivists, content merely to tear society's Legos apart in a depressive tempre tantrum fit. We are thinkers of the productive, building sort. Hence the origination of the intellectual lineage which is now called Reform-Leninism.

On this lesson I end my pondering rant. This document does not provide a structural, systematic methodology (coming articles will do that), but speaks to the long, most often hidden, march of the revolutionary intellectual impetus which has culminated in Reform-Leninism. As one man, it is difficult to recognise the importance of differing types of material. Hopefully, if nay one else, future party historians of Reform-Leninism will find this article helpful.