The Advance the Struggle blog has recently posted a contribution from the Kasama participant Red Spark collective entitled “Species of Revolt: On Revolutionary Organization” which writes the epitaph of post-Maoist opportunism better then any critic.

“The old theory of the vanguard sought to make one species dominant—to grow that species until it incorporated all others The result, of course, is a cancer, followed by the intrusion of the desert. The humans shoot all the wolves and the green fire goes out in their eyes and then the deer overgraze the mountain and starve in next year’s famine, leaving their bones to dry in a dust-locked wasteland.”

The “old” theory of the vanguard lead to the establishment of the world’s first socialist state, the triumph of the Chinese revolution, the victorious resistance of Indo-China against Euro-American imperialism and the emergence of all the most effective revolutionary movements of the past thirty years from Peru and Nepal to India and the Philippines.

What is the “cancer” these hipster poets speak of? The development of revisionism and eventual restoration of capitalism? When all the other tendencies which refused the Leninist theory of the party failed even to seize power? Spare us.

“This metaphor also helps us understand that there are not such harsh distinctions between an organization, affinity group or network. They co-exist, not just alongside each other but often mixed together. The mammal makes a nest in the flora while microorganisms exchange nutrients in its breath. Affinity groups exist within and across collectives, while all draw on the primary energy of basic community networks.”

Anybody familiar with the congenital incompetence of informal organizations and the culture of evading accountability which is their stock in trade knows what this metaphor is-an apology for comfortable failure.

“But every organization must have its own death inscribed into its very essence—none are immortal, save through their participation in the vibrant, exploding life of the ecosystem itself.”

What communist has ever opined on the “immortality” of the party? With whom is this text shadowboxing in the mirror? The party has never been considered anything but a historically transitory instrument of the class struggle.

“The commune as such extends into the network, into the affinity group, into the individual squatted house as well as the fleeting moment of a riot and the formal meeting of an anarchist international.”

So its come to this. Repudiating the conceptual framework of the international communist movement for the insubstantial rhetorical violence of Tiqqun?

“The principle behind this is that organizations can function in an active and intentional manner to make the entire community more responsive, and therefore more prone to spontaneous acts of revolt and self-organization. This is not equivalent to the organization acting as a vanguard to “lead” that community.”

We could continue our commentary but its unnecessary. Kasama who shamelessly support bourgeois electoralism in Greece today and Nepal yesterday, who tailed the vague populism of OWS in New York become insurrectionary anarchists in Seattle!

This is truly a pure and refined opportunism which adapts itself to whatever is popular at a given moment and when challenged for its shocking inconsistency falls back on the loose informality of its organizational style (in the manner of the more irresponsible elements of North American anarchism) while fulminating against the “dogmatism” of those who demand adherence to a coherent political line.

There can be no debate with such tendencies. Only exposure.