Abandoning the past sometimes allows you to see better the present...

An earlier version of this was posted as a reply at SMBIVA, but what the hell, I think it might merit a stand-alone, here.

So -

Perhaps it's just time to admit that while analysis and polemic which were written in 1848 and 1871 can still have some application to our times, they do not represent or embody them anymore than Lucretius' seminal work properly explains the modern popularization and lay embrace of the rudiments of atomic theory.

This looking back to look forward just sort of ignores what is new, now. It ignores the change it purports to explain.

As a reading of arabawy ought to demonstrate, not everything follows a Hegelian or post-Hegelian or dialectical development (h/t senecal). In fact, nothing does. The Dialectic is a bourgeois imposition upon events, not a revolutionary discovery of a law or process of nature. I know this a crude and unfavorable reading of a theory beloved of Lenin and Trotsky, but the conglomeration of muscles otherwise known as my heart do not contain their exact and equal opposite number, coming always in contention with the original, to later be synthesized as a new whole after a period of strife and struggle. If this ever actually occurs, the first moment I become aware of it will likely be my last, as it is undoubtedly a process which would kill me dead.

And if anything ought to come under the closest possible scrutiny, it's the broad connection between the Dialectic, as a means of explaining history and human choices, and the continued failure of the revolutionary left which embraces it; which Left is left almost always chasing actual events instead of making them (as is the case most recently made, in Egypt); and which is ever trying to push pin those events into a theory which it embraces like religious doctrine and which is as mystical and priestly as the Trismegistian Hermeticism from which Hegel originally - and openly - cribbed it.

It's time to dump the philosophical interpretations of the works of Hegel, Trotsky, Lenin, the Bolsheviks, the Frankfurters, the New Leftists, the Maoists - and the orthodox "Marxist" reading of Marx. Because they have never worked. They only serve the interests of bourgeois interlopers who imagine themselves as the indispensable vanguard to actual, historical revolutionary movements and groups which almost never even know these would-be vanguards exist.

These readings of history and the Dialectic are the correspondences and dispatches of a hundred and fifty year experiment in abject, complete and total failure. They do not accurately or scientifically describe the observable phenomena of our experience. They are priestly in their origin, and priestly in their utterance.

It's time to dump Hegel. To be done with a search for secret keys, overarching Meaning, the Spirit of Things and History, and special knowledge.

The work which faces us doesn't require a vanguard party. It does not need obedience to a doctrine, or the direction of professional revolutionaries who believe themselves armed with the secrets of an embodied and personified History, or the universe, or the mystical unfolding of dialectic processes.

That doesn't mean we should stop organizing.

It's just that we should probably not be - we leftists - so bourgeois, meritocratic, university educated and ruling class about it.

The working class, the colonized, the oppressed, the alienated and the poor don't need theories conjured up in academic discussions, in the coffee houses which line the well paved streets of upper class neighborhoods. They don't need special vocabularies and essays on superstructure, intersectionality and sociocultural meta-meta critique.

They need the bosses done with, the cops stripped of their weapons, the jailhouses broken and soldiers deprived of wars to fight for capital and Capitols.

If you  - if we - aren't willing to do that, it's time to admit what side you're actually on...