The Elite/Woke Alliance #3

The concept of The Revolutionary Vanguard is a secular version of the monotheistic conception of legitimacy as a function of Divine Intervention. Both are revolutionary notions, in that this legitimacy is not conferred or recognized by established systems of worldly authority. While the Prophet was rendered revolutionarily legitimate by the consciousness conferred by Divine Inspiration, the Revolutionary Vanguard is made legitimate in its assertion of sovereign authority by the fact of class consciousness. This transpersonal consciousness functions as the substrate of historical legitimacy, brought into conscious efficacy (according to Lenin) by Marx’s “critico-analytical genius”, which perceived in the revolutionary ferment of the Paris Commune the “practical measures” which might lead beyond the bourgeoise State apparatus to a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Wokism holds a similar concept of a substrate of sovereign authority residing within the awareness of the historically and systemically oppressed, though from the dissident Socialist perspective, this substrate of authority, rather than being catalyzed into practical measures capable of surmounting and destroying the White, Heteronormative, Transphobic, Supremacy (the Woke version of the Bourgeoisie), has instead been co-opted as a mantle by this very Supremacy.

From Lenin’s perspective, such a co-opting is inherent to the functioning of the State bureaucracy, which is so constructed as to “stand above” the society over which it rules. This detachment will invariably bend those who participate into this system away from whatever class consciousness they came in with, toward the perspective of the system itself.Thus, the periodic rising and falling of populist heroes like AOC, who enter the system spouting the rhetoric of revolutionaries but are quickly bent to serve the system of power, transformed by participation in the bureaucratic system from shepherds to sheepdogs.

It is this unavoidable tendency toward co-option, of destruction of the revolutionary spirit by participation in the Bourgeois State, that made, in Lenin’s view, Marx’s “critico-analytical genius” singularly valuable, and the *smashing* of this State and its apparatuses critical to the manifesting of the work of the Revolutionary Vanguard. So long as this System was retained, as something which it is impossible to live without, the flowers of the Vanguard would inevitably be bent away from the true conscience of the Revolutionary Vanguard, toward the false and spurious conscience intrinsic to Bourgeois Bureaucracy.

Marx’s “critico-analytical genius” showed the revolutionary path between opportunism and anarchism: the former which was captive to a “superstitious reverence” toward the Bourgeois State, combined with a “mortal dread” of the “creative power of revolution”; while the latter amounted to the ‘tactics of a despair’ which could see the need for *smashing* the State, but could conceive of nothing to put in its place, and therefore needed to maintain a perfect absence of understanding of the real social world. A prefect ignorance within which the heaviest nihilism might blend seamlessly with the airiest ideals.

By contrast, Marx conceived by careful analysis of Socialist revolutions a sort of State capable of successfully wielding dictatorial power, without being corrupted by that power to turn away from the true conscience of the class consciousness of the historically oppressed. For Lenin, as of August and September of 1917, the key differences articulated by Marx between the liberal democratic bureaucracy, which inevitably corrupts, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which functions to execute without corruption the will of the Revolutionary Vanguard, were three:

1. Instant recall of officials by democratic process.
2. Pay for such bureaucratic work reduced to that of other workers
3. Bureaucracies replaced by councils of workers, such that participation of government were a temporary duty shared equally by all.

Of course, this transformation of the Bureaucratic State is antithetical to the interests not only of that State itself, but of all those officials who have achieved wealth and status by their position within it. Given the perpetual corruption of the State, which from the Marxist perspective is nothing other than an instrument designed by the ruling class to oppresses the class it rules (that class of people who are socially necessary for service roles from factories to battlefields, but must be perpetually alienated from power, even while being given the simulation of it), the State must periodically renew its illusion of legitimacy by draping itself in the moral authority of the very class it perpetually oppresses.

Twenty years ago, the image of an illegitimate State draping itself in the moral authority of the very people it oppresses was provided by elections within Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The object lesson was elsewhere, in the enemy we had to militarily rid the world of, for the good of all.

Today, the example of the fraudulent State, draping itself in the moral authority of the very people it oppresses, appears closer to home. All of which is to answer the overarching question: Why has the Elite gone Woke?