Evangelizing Pagans: about red groups [en]

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<div class='rss_texte'><p>Since 2 or 3 years, youth red groups grow in German and Austrian cities. Displaying strength and dynamism, they claim to follow Marxist theory strictly with the goal of building socialism. This is not the first time these groups have been active (see Geronimo, Feuer und Flamme). But we are in a different moment. What does this form of activism tell us about the current times? Why are these groups not joining existing Marxist groups? How do they differ?</p>
<p>Hard to say from a theoretical viewpoint. Rather, red groups differ in their aesthetics and actions (mainly symbolic), playing with codes of harshness, comradeship, and radicality to attract new members. Because that's how they differ from traditional Marxist groups, it becomes a huge part of their political program. The difference is located in strategy rather than theory. This aesthetic branding progressively becomes more than a means, an end in itself. The references to communist symbols are supposed to carry Marxism; the form its content. Moreover, red groups are centered on what's going on in the milieu; signaling changes in its composition, but not emerging outside it from class struggle. Expression of the slow decomposition of the revolutionary scene after the collapse of the proletarian movement, they can be analyzed as a sub-cultural movement.</p>
<p>The old K-groups dismantled themselves at the end of the 1970s and vanished into marginal phenomena. At that time, numerous members switched to the newly founded Green, such as Winfried Kretschmann, who belonged to K-groups in their youth. The phenomenon is by no means limited to the Greens or professional politicians in general. Quite a few professors and journalists have a past with the KPD/AO or the Kommunistischen Bund. Hence: the objective function of these groups is the political socialization of some groups of the middle-class youth, ensuring its reproduction. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. Whereas the question is how we can live fully and not survive; that is, the revolution of everyday life, red groups mediate.</p>
<p>“The proletariat having been destroyed, this tendency of capital encounters no real opposition in society and so can produce itself all the more efficiently. The proletariat's real essence has been denied, and it exists only as an object of capital. Similarly, the theory of the proletariat, Marxism, has been destroyed, Kautsky first revising it and then Bernstein liquidating it. This occurred in a definitive manner, for no assault of the proletariat has succeeded since then in reestablishing Marxism. This is only another way of saying that capital has succeeded in establishing its real domination. To accomplish this, capital had to absorb the movement that negates it, the proletariat, and establish a unity in which the proletariat is merely an object of capital. This unity can be destroyed only by a crisis, such as those described by Marx. It follows that all forms of working-class political organization have disappeared. In their place, gangs confront one another in an obscene competition, veritable rackets rivaling each other in what they peddle but identical in their essence. (...)</p>
<p>In its external relations, the political gang tends to mask the existence of the clique, since it must seduce in order to recruit. It adorns itself in a veil of modesty so as to increase its power. When the gang appeals to external elements through journals, reviews, and leaflets, it thinks that it has to speak on the level of the mass in order to be understood. It talks about the immediate because it wants to mediate. Considering everyone outside the gang an imbecile, it feels obliged to publish banalities and bullshit so as to successfully seduce them. In the end, it seduces itself by its own bullshit, and it is thereby absorbed by the surrounding milieu. However, another gang will take its place, and its first theoretical wailings will consist of attributing every misdeed and mistake to those who have preceded it, looking in this way for a new language so as to begin again the grand practice of seduction; in order to seduce, it has to appear to be different from the others.”</p>
<p>Camatte, Jacques. (1995) [1972]. On organization. In Invariance / Transition</p></div>