“… Kautskyists (or “Leninists”) are silly. They think they need to bring some grand theory to the ‘ignorant proles,’ as if historical materialism is some kind of prescriptive theory or tactic and not a descriptive outlook that is about the interaction between objective phenomena and subjective consciousness, and therefore envelops both. When it comes to survival and necessity, ideology is trumped by class, the true determinant in social development in the last instance as proved by the actual proletarian revolutions of the early 20th century which have unfortunately become eclipsed in our ideological world by the petty party politicking that engaged in necrophilia with the bloated corpses of the revolutions.

“Our class does not need to have learned old (or young) men leading us by a leash and it is precisely Marx who uncovered this by uncovering that people do not make their history the way they want but that they are coerced by their own alienated powers, by forces that are beyond mere human control (capital, market discipline, etc.). History is the product of human conscious will, but it almost never turns out the way the actors would have wanted it to be because the real relations that drive people and the forces that coerce them are alienated from them and therefore overgrown with layers of ideology. The modern degenerating neoliberal capitalist system was not the creation of any Enlightenment theorist or any big boogeyman. The fact that we are in crisis and no one has any ideas or sees a way out should tell us that our ideas and theories are not in control of the trajectory of this society, but rather capital is, a blind force of our own creation.

“Encompassed by Marxist theory itself is the fact that no theory can extricate itself from the development of history and act as a universal panacea. What makes communism fundamentally different then from a ‘political ideology’, is precisely that it is not the outcome of ideology or enlightening enough people, but is rather a result of these alienated forces of history themselves acting upon and compelling human agency. Marx pointed this out in Capital, which rather than being a mere scientific work on capitalism, was also an outline of the traces of future communist society, by pointing out the interaction of alienated forces that prepare the conditions for the self-destruction of capital. This is why communism is not ‘political’ and why all these ridiculous Trot, Tankie, and Maoist cults with their red flags are irrelevant and why left unity is a dumb concept in general because all of this is just ideologues mistaking the class struggle for a struggle of ideas.

“Only after class society has been abolished can social existence be determined by self-consciousness, be it by some lay person or by a learned intellectual, because only then alienation has been overcome and society is re-created rationally every day by people who have not only conquered the forces of nature that were alien to them (for Marx the fundamental drive behind historical development) but also reconquered their own activity which had become alienated in its turn. Communism can be created by people who do not even know what they are doing but are simply following their self-interest when confronted with a particular historical situation.” — Aeolianharps of /r/socialism