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Observation on the Dangers Rewrite

  • Writer: The Master
    The Master
  • Oct 3
  • 7 min read

Updated: Oct 4

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I. The Origin Crisis (the present impasse)


We stand at a serious crossroads. The Left is fracturing into two unhealthy tendencies that together threaten to hollow out any living socialist project.


On one side are comrades who have hardened into dogma. They treat party lines as catechisms; internal discipline becomes ritual; questions are punished rather than answered. On the other side are comrades who have abandoned theoretical formation and substantive reading, embracing managerial liberalism and identitarian politics that reduce political work to reputation-management and institutional signalling.


Put simply: half the movement is bound by unthinking orthodoxy; the other half has become intellectually thin — content to accept managerial fixes and identity adjudication instead of building a Marxist theory of practice. Neither tendency can produce the cultivated, deliberative cadres we need. The result is factionalism, drift, and an erosion of political efficacy.


This article diagnoses why we have reached this point, shows how the problem goes deeper than the usual intra-left quarrels, and offers programmatic remedies that return cultivation — education, culture, and plural institutional life — to the heart of socialist strategy.


II. Bigger than the Hegel quarrel


Many contemporary fights among Marxists are framed as disputes about Hegel: whether Marx’s critique rests on a Hegelian inheritance, how dialectics should be read, and so on. Those quarrels matter, but they are not the core of our present crisis.


Two points matter here.


First, Hegelianism can be useful or toxic depending on how it is used. Read as a method, Hegelian dialectics can sharpen analysis; read as a metaphysical liturgy it becomes a mechanism for doctrinal certainty. The latter breeds the very sectarianism and spiritualised dogma that hollow out independent thought.


Second, the present crisis is primarily organisational and cultural — about how movements form minds and institutions — not merely interpretive. The Hegel dispute becomes dangerous when it functions as a loyalty test. What matters for our capacity to act is whether organisations cultivate readers, discussants, and public intellectuals, or whether they condition members to repeat lines and treat doctrine as immutable.


So yes: settle the Hegel quarrel where it helps method, but do not let it remain a badge that polices thought and punishes curiosity.


III. The culture dilemma — description or collective decision?


A vital strand of socialist thought — Gorky, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gramsci, many socialist humanists — insisted that culture matters politically. “High culture” here is not snobbery but the collection of institutions and practices (books, law, pedagogy, the humanities, crafts of public argument) that develop capacities for self-governance.


Two ways of treating culture currently compete.


One is culture-as-description: culture is a neutral set of practices to be catalogued and then left alone. The other is culture-as-collective project: culture must be actively reproduced, sustained, and reformed if a democratic socialist society is to be possible.


The abandonment of cultural cultivation has several consequences. When reading, classical education, and public argument atrophy, politics becomes a contest of gestures and managerial reforms rather than a project of formation. People become dependent on party catechisms or on managerial institutions to tell them what to think. Without habitual attention and shared reference points, political discourse degrades into slogans, moral panics, and symbolic policing.


This is not merely abstract. The decline in reading and in institutional support for intellectual life fuels both top-down coercion and low-grade social policing. The Cultural Revolution and its equivalents show how mass anti-culture can be weaponised into terror; the modern “cancel” culture shows how moral adjudication without deliberative institutions fragments public life. Both outcomes are enemies of a cultivated socialist republicanism.


A practical test: if the Left cannot sustain reading circles, workers’ schools, libraries, and public humanities programmes, it will lack the social capital to govern democratically. Conversely, where culture is privileged, deliberation and care for institutions become possible.


IV. Lenin’s gravest error — the dogmatic terror of vanguardism


Lenin’s political innovations solved critical organisational problems in the revolutionary era. But his model — a centralised, professional party wielding strict internal discipline — carries structural dangers when institutionalised as doctrine.


What is vanguardism? In brief: an organisational model that relies on a compact, central leadership and party structures that enforce a single line. It presumes that political unity can be secured by disciplining or excluding dissent. It enshrines internal policing and faction bans as the mechanism to preserve revolutionary purity.


Where this model is taken as an organising principle rather than an emergency tactic, several pathologies arise:


Dogmatism and purge logic. When disagreements are framed as factional treason rather than political debates, the solution becomes exclusion, then purges, then terror. Historic examples — from early Bolshevik faction bans to Stalin-era excesses — show how quickly purification becomes violence.


Cadre burnout. Professional revolutionary cadres trained under strict discipline often burn out, churn, or ossify; the party replaces culture-building with catechism, and cadres cease to be organs of popular education.


Delegitimation of political authority. Power exercised without the backing of cultivated civil society becomes brittle and coercive; it lacks the social roots for stable governance.


This is not to deny that the organised capacity of a party can be decisive in revolutionary situations. Rather, it is to insist on causal order: culture and material conditions create the soil in which power can be legitimate and effective. Power imposed without cultivation often produces collapse, counter-revolution, or worse.


A further danger is that vanguardist methods can be adopted by the supposedly liberal or managerial Left in a new idiom: purges by committee, professional ostracism, and administrative penalties for dissidents. When that happens, the Left is cannibalising its own capacity to educate and govern.


V. Do the reading — oppose book-worship, oppose anti-reading


We must be clear: “book-worship” — the formalistic and uncritical recitation of canonical lines — is different from cultivating a reading culture. True reading teaches attention, context, and argumentation; book-worship substitutes slogans for reflection.


The decline in sustained reading is not an incidental cultural loss; it is a strategic problem. Movements that do not encourage broad reading and disciplined study wind up with cadres who cannot test claims, compare theories, or formulate persuasive programmes. They trade reasoning for slogans and assume that a party line can replace public intellectual life.


A reading culture should be practised, not idolised. We must support worker and community reading circles, libraries, public lectures, and study groups — not as aristocratic afternoon pursuits but as instruments of mass education and political formation. Opposing “book-worship” means opposing both blind literalism and anti-intellectualism; it means making reading a shared practice in the movement rather than a ritual enactment.


VI. Four Nosts & Stroikas — programmatic remedies


Reform-Leninism, as I sketch it, is not a nostalgic plea to restore an idealised past; it is a practical program to rebuild the capacities the Left needs. The program gathers under four institutional thrusts — Gladsnost, Politstroika, Disclosnost, and Theorestroika — each aimed at correcting particular pathologies.


Gladsnost — Cordialness and rehabilitation


Create structures that prioritise comradely repair over denunciation. Institutionalise rehabilitation processes (Comrehabin) for those unjustly condemned, and appoint Friendship Kommissars whose task is mediation and restoration of ties. The aim: durable movements rest on relationships, not purges.


Politstroika — Political upstanding and competence


Design promotion and accountability processes that reward competence, probity, and public service rather than factional loyalty. Transparent procedures, peer review, and public recognition of merit reduce patronage and restore trust.


Disclosnost — Disclosure, transparency, and Diskommizdat


Implement open procedures for disciplinary matters and publish documents that materially affect comrades’ rights. Create safe channels for whistleblowing and an institutional duty to publish archival materials at risk. Transparency constrains secretive policing and builds collective confidence.


Theorestroika — Theoretical restructuring and cultural re-creation


Rebuild intellectual life: mass education programmes, workers’ schools, public humanities funding, and study circles. Support scholarship in socialist law, political economy, and cultural theory. Make theory public and practical: reading as strategy, not ceremony.


These are not cosmetic reforms. They are structural priorities: cultivate the social capacities that make power effective, then design institutions that channel power under public control.


Practical institutional ideas (sketches)


The Union Council of Communist and Comrades’ Parties (UCCCP).

A multi-party legislative forum that anchors long-term strategy and prevents a single party’s executive from unilaterally remaking constitutional orders. It would set strategic plans, vet executive actions, and provide inter-party constitutional continuity.


Court of Socialist Hearing.

An independent, transparent tribunal for inter-Left disputes: discipline, corruption, and rights-of-membership would be adjudicated openly with appeal procedures. This channels conflict into deliberative formats rather than clandestine purges.


Renewed Socialist Legality.

Develop a body of socialist constitutional doctrine articulating procedures for emergency powers, sunset clauses for decrees, and protections for civil society — a legal architecture that both enables decisive action and protects against arbitrary authority.


Planning dialectic.

Combine long-term, legislature-backed strategic plans (6-year frames) with shorter tactical plans (3-year) issued by executive organs, subject to review by the UCCCP. This balances continuity and flexibility.


VII. A word of hope to discouraged comrades


Reform is hard precisely because it demands patient rebuilding. But it is possible. Where movements have invested in schooling, cultural institutions, and procedures that respect pluralism, democracy survives and deepens.


Our immediate tasks are simple in outline though hard in practice: restore reading as mass practice; rebuild mediating institutions; bind power to reversible, public procedures; and prize competence and friendship over denunciation. That is the work of years. It is also, in my view, the only safe road to socialism that is democratic, durable, and humane.


Appendix I — J. O. Martov (excerpt)


“Comrade Lenin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us social democrats, becomes intolerable in the leader of a faction. … From the standpoint of safeguards against a unbridgeable division … this is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”

— J. O. Martov, Testament on the Leader of the Bolsheviks (excerpt)


A reminder that tolerance and procedural civility are not cowardice but institutional protections.


Appendix II — UCCCP State-Structure (concise notes)


Goal: anchor political continuity in a multi-party forum that prevents unilateral executive redesign.


Core elements:


UCCCP (supreme legislature): sets strategic goals, approves long-term plans (6-year), and has supremacy over foundational reforms.


Central Committee (party executive): issues tactical 3-year plans and coordinates executive implementation.


Secretariat / Politburo / Kommissariats: execute policy under legal review.


Orgburo / Court of Socialist Hearing: review legality and adjudicate disciplinary or constitutional disputes.


Temporal checks: decrees expire unless renewed; emergency powers limited and subject to judicial/legislative review.


Principles: vanguard parties can execute policy but not unilaterally rewrite foundational statutes; judicial and legislative firewalls prevent disciplinary terror; multi-party oversight reduces ossification.


Short glossary (for readers new to the terms)


Vanguardism: Lenin’s model of a centralised revolutionary party that enforces discipline to preserve unity.


Diskommizdat: dissident communist publishing — institutional mechanisms to publish censored or relevant internal material.


Yezhovshchina: the Great Terror (Stalin-era purge campaigns of 1937–38).


Hegelians: those who foreground Hegel’s dialectical method; here the label warns against metaphysical readings that ossify into doctrinal test.

 
 
 

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