THE ENDLESS EFFORT TOWARDS REVOLUTION

Excerpts from the book “La democracia y el triunfo del estado” (Democracy and the triumph of the State) by the Spanish author Felix Rodrigo Mora.

On the endless effort towards revolution...

Simone Weil said that “we are living a time without future”. This is a really distressing assertion which, although full of truth must also be reflected upon much more thoroughly. In reality it is an act of prospective or prescience but not a demonstrable statement. It is true that it may express the most likely pace the events will take in the coming future but if we interpret it from the standpoint that it is not possible to turn the present into the past through its destruction, thus opening a way to the future as a reality qualitatively different from both the present and the past, then it is not a satisfactory affirmation. Shakespeare's hopeful warning; “every slave has in their hands the possibility of suppressing their own captivity”, structured in a pure difference between present-slavery versus future-emancipation still remains valid.

Perhaps it is already impossible to transform or overthrow the existing society but not to take a stance against it and establish finalities that contain by themselves the denial of the existing world (of its most undesirable traits, not all of them), in its substance as much as in what it has of unessential, temporary, anecdotal and formal.

As we affirm the negation of what it is as well as the adhesion to what it can be as “being-anything else” in our consciousness, we are going from the present to the future and even creating the latter along the process. As we set finalities categorically different we are giving ourselves hope. If the established aims are sublime, if they are not reduced to a display of “realism”, then they will provide us with these “virtuous emotions” Kant used to refer to, transmitters of a great inner energy.

As we set objectives of an extraordinary complexity as well as a colossal difficulty after having reached an agreement within ourselves swearing to make lifelong efforts towards them, paying attention neither to their feasibility nor to the pleasures their realisation could bring us but just because they are the right and good thing to do (thus accepting the duty of effort) we are improving ourselves and lifting our spirits in an optimal way. Once we achieve this it will not be possible to affirm in such a categorical way that there is no future as Simone Weil does since the most primordial of it is in the subject, including its qualities, skills, its value and its elevation.

There are some ideas of an experiential-reflective nature that may not be realisable (only time will tell) but that does not make them insignificant, quite the opposite as they provide us with the indispensable orientation our actions must follow if we truly wish good and truth to become their reference and moving force. With the nefarious question about what must be deemed feasible and “possible” in order to turn it into a “realistic” aim, the aforementioned moving force collapses. If such a finite entity as human being is gives itself only mediocre plans, what is going to be left of it then?, what will it happen with humanity?.

Coming up with finalities whose majesty elevate our spirits, even though it is just a little over our own daily mediocrity and insignificance is essential, which is why “realism”, so dear concept to the present political charade, manifest itself as totally the opposite, sheer unrealism that does not take into account the transcendent component of human affairs which goes always hand in hand with the most pedestrian respects of it and needs to be cultivated and considered in order to realise universal and integral individuals. This means that the ends as well as ends, are means in themselves that allow the individual to exist and be with greatness which is to say, in a specifically human way.

The ideologies of the possible reform of society place all their odds in the achievement of an imaginary order or final stage, scornfully ignoring the rightness of the ends in themselves, the effort to be realised, conceived as a good in itself, and the self-built value of the individual. For them only it is all about “tangible results” nothing else counts. This might be a result of the hedonistic selfishness that characterises these ideologies since according to them what must be accomplished by a society is “plenty and happiness” (Saint Simon) and nothing else within what really matters if we leave aside some bits of ornamental rhetoric.

It only takes losing any interest in such ends for the matter of a radical change and a positive, civilising revolution to be looked at in a much more fruitful way. Let us examine now the most particular and central topic in our times; It might well be true that the downfall of liberal-representative dictatorship will never happen, neither the constitution of a free society, however what is really undeniable is that 1) WE CAN AND MUST expose with arguments that liberalism, in all its forms is a regime of tyranny and that the really good and desirable society is democracy, as self-government through a network of coordinated sovereign assemblies, because this is just the truth as well as the expression of political good. 2) by doing so, and by developing the pertinent struggles about the issue, we would be creating ourselves as better individuals which would never happen if we let ourselves to get penned in the mental trap of “what is possible” scorning on what is true even if not feasible. 3) If what is possible is not good, why should we support it anyway?. If we let what is feasible at a low cost in terms of effort distract us from what is truly appropriate there will remain very little left from us as human beings. The only exigency to act this way is that our targets are never impossible in themselves, being enough in order to admit them their excellent and essential to the realisation of the human essence. They just need to contain certain level; no matter how little it might be of feasibility.

In the case that this feasibility was nought, it would be necessary to reflect and meditate about it in order to extract from inexorability the most appropriate lessons and emotions in the same way we do before the inevitability of death, insuperable reality which cannot be approached in practical fashion, thinking on the achievement of tangible results given that immortality and infinity are and will never be doable.

Thus it would neither be legitimate to support political evil in this case solely because of its existence, nor even to maintain that with just a few easy reforms this system would stop being what it is and cannot stop being. Even if it was demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that (direct) democracy was impossible and so it was a democratizing revolution the present order would not stop being a dictatorship and therefore it should not deter our moral and intellectual obligation of denounce it for what it is and so resist it entirely, making this one of the greatest aims of our own life along with the preparation to make ourselves fit to live together among equals (that is to say, in democracy) out of inner conviction.

When there are not finalities, or when these are outrageous and low, what follows is an inner downfall of individuals and societies since human being cannot live without hope, that is, without love or ends. Shared aims re-socialise, unite and regenerate us, leading towards action. Under the present circumstances we should set for ourselves exultant objectives just in the edge of what is possible. Ends that demand from us in their formulation as much as in their realisation the highest levels of intelligence, willpower, imagination, collectivism, generosity, passionate strength and courage, bearing in mind what Saavedra Fajardo said in his work “Empresas politicas”: “Cautiousness is not always happy, neither is recklessness always unfortunate”.

Therefore since future is always an unsafe certainty, those who wish to become agents and architects rather than mere spectators must take every possibility to its very limit, no matter how insignificant it might look towards the realisation of a free and truly civilised society. They must always cast a vigilant eye over the moments of weakness of the present dictatorship in order to fall over it at daggers drawn, reaching victory if they have been competent enough and if fortune is in their side or accepting defeat, aware of the fact that this is a lesser evil compared to the sub-human existence of nowadays slaves of modernity.




In the old times it often happened that the oppressed rebelled not due to the actual possibilities of victory but to the fact that, under certain conditions love for freedom throbbed in their spirits to such an extent that a magnificent death was preferred over any state of daily subjection. Today, because of triumphant modernity has achieved the extinction of the love and passion for freedom in the weak spirits of the new servants, this does not happen anymore.

Such state of affairs expresses very well the misery of our time in which any sensualist pleasure and no matter what cheap voluptuousness, even the most despicable ones are much more appreciated than being and existing in freedom. Passion for freedom is a sublime agitation of the soul that goes, as any other sort of passion, hand in hand with the category of what is terrible, the latter conceived as what is irreconcilable and implacable in its highest degree, in this case the enemies of freedom, more powerful nowadays than in any other moment of History.

Good, in its different realisations, manifest itself better as an effort towards good than as an already achieved goal, more as something that demands commitment and sacrifice than as tangible and immediately enjoyable realisation. If struggle in itself constitutes the greatest and more desirable good achievable targets then become a secondary component of it. Thus the absolute and definitive issues are effort, magnanimous devotion while secondary matters are those that might be attainable or have already been accomplished. This allow us to establish as primary finality a certain way or style of living and thinking based on effort and struggle and consisting of the act of giving oneself and battling in a disinterested fashion, day after day, year after year towards great and transcendent purposes.

Effort in itself becomes both means and goal but above all a goal. From this it must be inferred that enthusiasm and hope for a civilising revolution have to be established not so much due to its possible achievements but as a guiding complex plan characterised by an ardour, a determination and a constant practice that are in themselves the most valuable thing.

This may be too much to ask to individuals such as the present ones, imperatively trained in apathy and reluctance. Individuals, for whom enthusiasm is inconceivable and impracticable if it does not come from greed, thirst for power, vilifying passions, alcohol and drugs. Leopardi said “what was killing the Ancient world is the absence of enthusiasm” situation that is repeating itself nowadays when what really counts is the meanness of petty daily “satisfactions” within a desolate scenario of pathological hopelessness, nihilism and sadness. What can be inferred from this is that an agonistic-fighting based world view is more appropriate that a utilitarian and possibilistic one. The former wishes more to fight than to triumph, the latter is only focused in results, in enjoying the outcomes as a reward or bounty; with no concern on how disgraceful or miserable these may be. This is nothing but a chimera since to live means to exist within conflict and so there cannot be a human live that is not a specific form of struggle, tension and pain.

Any end stage is always relative: Firstly because it is insufficient, secondly because it is unstable and reversible, third because one it has been accomplished new efforts must be made towards new goals, fourth because as a consequence of the former points every achievement is unsatisfactory and even disappointing. The delusion of attaining a state of affairs that is in itself sufficient, irreversible, absolute (without any exigency of ulterior plans) and utterly flattering has not its origin in experience but in the ingenuity, laziness and childishness embedded in human heart. In the real world, every end stage constitutes at the same time another beginning so every achievement is in the end nothing but a disappointment. Therefore there is no rest, there are neither heavenly nor earthly paradises, the quiet enjoyment of what has been achieved does not exist, and live is a constant flow of activity, effort, restlessness and struggle. Certain difficulties get solved just to begin immediately facing a brand new set of them and when we are lead to think that everything has already been attained, that it is no longer necessary to strive for new aims decadence and decomposition appear. The greater the delusion of having already realised a personal or collective Eden the worse the latter will be. Hence that what is more desirable are not the aims in their way of being but in their way of becoming, of turning into something which is to say, as a process more than a realisation.

Struggle is the only possible victory, the only complete and safe one as we can just reach goals that even at their very best will always be perfectible, therefore imperfect and always demanding ulterior efforts, which proves wrong to all those who seek definitive final stages, Eden gardens and “paradises”. The conclusion of all this is that a radical transformation of the present order can never be a punctual event, a date such as the French Revolution (1789) or the Russian one (1917), but an endless effort to transform the political order and transform ourselves as well through such a duty. This process may see certain critical moments as well as achieve concrete results but it should never be reduced to that. The latter is even truer in the future revolutions, conceived as the conquest of equal freedom for everybody since this embodies the possibility of realising ulterior transformations. However such a possibility might well be seized or not depending on the system of finalities that may be established afterwards.

According to the old epicurean-leftist view revolution is desirable because of the tangible and enjoyable advantages it could bring about in such a way that the subject-individual wants to be served by the revolution rather than serve the revolution. With this all the system of transcendent values that allow the individual to accumulate inner strength for action and give the latter any sense or meaning gets harmed since revolution must either be a magnanimous and disinterested act or not being anything at all. It always turns out to be impossible to carry out any radical transformation by following particular interests be this of class, group or party due to three main reasons. One is that the amount of effort is usually so great that what is actually achieved does not often make up for it. Another reason is that particular interest gets much better satisfaction within the present order. A third and more important reason is that in the case that such a transformation actually takes place what would come up of such an alteration would be a new system based on self-interest and not in values (above all magnanimity and service to one another) which would lead us to a failed transformation, a mere re-creation of what exists now, possibly a worse version of it as it has actually happened in all the pernicious revolutions realised between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Indeed revolution can be anything but the “feast of the oppressed”. It is more likely to be a drama and an evil, sometimes a necessary one but always an evil that open the gates to a still more uncertain, troubling and tragic future.

One more argument against the optimistic faith in “happy” and gratifying revolutions comes from an upsetting conclusion extracted from the impartial examination of History since the fate of good and those who take sides with it normally is one of failure and defeat, rarely victory. If there is any victory whatsoever this often is quite incomplete and unstable in such a way that it usually contains many elements of what opposes it and so does not last for too long. Good exists more in the form of excluded, marginalised, vituperated and persecuted potentiality, doomed to misfortune and defeat age after age than as a victorious and fully accomplished realisation. This is the reason why Tacitus conceives virtue as eternally unlucky and the initial Christians considered themselves as fugitives in a way one could call ontological. We must wait until the perverse theory of “progress” emerges to find an argumentative although never proved statement that the ultimate fate of good is in its realisation and continuous success. But it does not happen like this because what this theory calls the triumphant good, that gets imposed or the realisation of the best society eventually is nothing but the good for the state, that is to say for the worst expression of evil in politics.

What is being exposed here should not be considered a discouraging conclusion but the exact exposition of the real way of existence of good which does not admit its realisation forever but a maintained effort and that expresses itself in the form of what is excluded and persecuted but not as victory or triumph. Perhaps human History will get to be different in the coming future but what we know about it here and now does not allow for a different interpretation. Therefore, those who crave for tangible “results” and wish external “achievements” end up sooner or later taking sides with with the institutionalised-mainstream part of the system plotting revolutions that convey the renovation and perfecting of the establishment instead of its overcoming and destruction.

Renouncing to formulate any question about what is possible as well as about victories and triumphs by sticking to the much more modest purposes of constant struggle and effort leaving in the hands of fortune or fate the establishment of any final result helps a lot to avoid taking the reformist path. Thus, revolution is, in the first place and above all AND ENDLESS EFFORT TOWARDS REVOLUTION.



On utopian socialism and leftism...


... What later would be known as “Utopian Socialism”, very influenced by the world-view of the “Enlightenment” and the “Philosophers” (the most effective mouthpieces and theorists of the 18th century's Absolutist Monarchies) is the first consolidated expression of the European political left.

It appeared in the early 19th century as a legitimate and initially full of hopes response to the cataclysmic changes to the worse and crisis of civilising values that came as a result of the Liberal and Industrial Revolutions along with the destruction of popular traditional (rural) society.

However, those who intellectually truly undertook such a duty did not manage to do it in a creative and independent way but let themselves to be co-opted in the field of reflection by two quite negative schools of thinking: One was that of the 18th century “Philosophers” and those who carried out with their work, namely the most radical liberal-progressive intellectuals. The other one was that of the utopian writers in former centuries highly focused in designing an ideal society of delights, based on the practical realisation of total self-enjoyment. Thus, the initial goal, so laudable at the very beginning ended up in a pitiful failure.

By taking the most representative work of this current “Voyage en Icarie”, written by Ettienne Cabet and published in 1839, we can see how the most representative traits of the whole left(ism) heritage can be already found on it: an entire set of consumerist fantasies, all of them rational-optimistic, hedonist, progressive, technophile, technocratic and eudemonistical (1), forgers of a grave state of non-spirituality highly destructive of the concrete human specificity. Such views help to generate ideas capable of acting as a potent narcotic in the minds of the malcontent and the rebels. Everything seemed to be about designing first and building later an earthly paradise as the final stage of History in which Humankind could enjoy and delight itself for the rest of eternity.



On victimism, hedonism and the average leftist attitude...

... What immediately attracts our attention in this doctrine is its childishness and narcissism. The former because only from a high level of mental immaturity can the construction of a perfect society be deemed feasible and even desirable since it goes totally against what human beings learn through experience, that is to say; that the whole reality is incomplete and contradictory, always the result of an addition of good and evil and therefore intrinsically imperfect.

Besides, as it has already been said earlier (in this book) a perfect society would conform, given its own limitless luxury and correctness, a type of individuals highly imperfect, since they would be stripped of the stimulus of ongoing effort and (sometimes even) suffering towards a continuous enhancement of society as well as themselves. Such individuals would be reduced to the condition of mere caricatures.

Personal as well as any given body of ideas or movement's maturity is reached when the childish and metaphysical notion of “perfection” is done away with and it is admitted that the most sacrificed and firm conflicts can provide us with better and improvable realities compared to the ones existing today, never with perfect realities and that still all the effort made in this direction is worthy so it must be carried out and never stop.

On the other hand (it must be said) that in this texts the individual is conceived as a simple end product of the ruling social, economical and technical forces as a being constructed from outside of her//himself, stripped of any free will, self and responsibility.

This exogenous subject forever irresponsible and powerless is displayed as the perpetual victim of “society”, “capitalism”, “the state”, and “the bourgeois”, (“Men for the feminists) etc... and this generates the psychological habit of victimism, crucial in the world view of leftism. This induces the subject to replace action towards liberation with a perennial whining and mere verbal denunciation of one's own situation whose solution is always expected to originate from outside oneself rather than from the most important field which is (should be at least) from within ourselves.

Such a doctrinal cancellation of vital autonomy as well as the inner live inside the human being will have nefarious consequences. One of them is the constitution of a deterministic conception of social change which would be the theoretical work of so-called “scientific” socialism essential to leave the mental predicament towards which the formerly exposed point of view had lead.

If human beings (proletarians in this case) are merely an end product of external potencies so their liberation must come from forces of that very same nature instead of from themselves, therefore not from their free thinking action or volition. This enunciates the worst of all reifications and reductionism of the subject to practical nothingness.

Another inference is that if exogenous social forces are presented as the single cause (always) of social evil, the individual gets exonerated of any responsibility as it is conceived as an innocent 100% good and immaculate victim. Such a fatuous and narcissist angle contradicts the fact that as real experience shows every single human being seems to be a unity of opposites in constant conflict; a mental as well as physical formation highly contradictory, always endowed with a dark side as well as a certain amount of inner evil which the subject is bound to counteract, repress and fight forever. The decision and the fact of doing this account for one of the most crucial conditions for the realisation of the intrinsic potential goodness of the human being.

The refusal to consider human nature as a twisted interaction of external factors (those the subject is either not responsible at all or just partly responsible) and internal ones (factors about which it is possible to demand accountability and endorse the person with certain degree of guilt) led us to a scenario where the average left-wing individual is characterised for a type of personality highly irresponsible, lazy and lame, with no psychological strength, unsociable to the limits of sheer rudeness and quasi-autism, egocentric and stripped of any inner sense of guilt.

All this due to their lack of an impulse towards self-enhancement, to hold oneself responsible for him//herself and for the world, to cultivate one's own faculties by following a planned personal procedure and eventually to acknowledge oneself as a significant participant and major actor in social evil by means of the participation of one's own wrongdoing and inner evil be it non-repressed or just by omission whether wilful (voluntary) or not respect to the external influences.

If in Ancient Philosophy, the value and capacity of the subject was considered as a fundamental variable in both social live and history, in the leftist view the individual is a mere nothingness, something that does not count as the “Laws of History” will take care of everything and “the exploiters” are conveniently elevated in a Manichean way to the status of sole responsible for everything under the sun. Such a theoretically based disdain towards the quality and value of the person has been and still is, one of the weakest points of leftism as well as an important cause of many among its continuous practical defeats, which can be observed for instance in the great failure of the Spanish Civil War.

The latter can no more be justified with the customary huge doses of victimism neither with the everlasting invocation of the (otherwise very real) perfidy and cruelty of Francoism or resorting to the argument of Franco's troops in terms of economical and military resources (quite inadequate appreciation by the way).

Franco's regime was what everybody knows, that is true, but it is not less true that its opponents proved incapable of opposing him effectively, important fact that should be followed by an exigency of responsibility and an inquiry about the causes.
The left combines the haughtiness and egotism typical of every mediocre personality, taken to a greater scale with a lack of concern for the value of the human subject and the absence of a project aimed at fostering more sociable, powerful and superior individuals from within themselves.

It can be said that supposedly revolutionary creeds lack a concept of the subject other than their expedite reduction to objects (at the mercy of great impersonal forces imaginably operative “in History”) which originates from having the oblivion of one of the most important recommendations of Leopardi; namely being always committed with the permanent effort in order to develop an “strong and elevated” soul, appropriate to carry out what Plutarch called “laudable and virtuous actions”.

It comes without saying that under the present conditions it is not possible to begin any change aimed to improve society. This leads us again to the sneaky suspicion that leftist ideology was never elaborated to do the former but just to the opposite purpose; to stabilise the existing establishment by reducing its potential adversaries to utter nothingness.

On exploitation...

… by turning the category “exploitation” into the core issue behind everything or rather, THE issue, the totality; “proletarianisms” have pushed away from of the average subject's attention the most fundamental issues and so prepared the political environment for an approach to social conflicts purely based in money. This in the end is the same as forcing everybody into the very same direction wished by our master elites.

Through the enthronement of the notion of exploitation along with the magnification of purely economical struggle, the masses get accustomed to make money the most essential aspect in their lives, which is the same as denaturing and prostituting the most essential matters in their whole existence as it can be so easily observed in present times.

If we admit that money is evil just for being an instrument of the state as well as its generated institutions, aimed at mental, material and political domination of the crowd, then it must also be acknowledged that for the last 150 years the left can be counted among those who have done the most to make it attractive.


Felix Rodrigo Mora