In Defense of Revolutionary Organisation Part 2

Going Round in Circles

The ICC has for some time now been making a distinction between the "circle spirit" (bad) and the "party spirit" (good). Having discovered "clans" propogating the "circle spirit" within their midst, they hope to drag themselves out from the swamp by tugging at their own hair. They are destined to continually revolve round in circles not from any emanations from the spirit world, but from the way they have constructed their ideology around a series of concentric circles. The question of organisation is reduced to that of the party, the question of the party is in turn reduced to a fellowship of discourse. Within this circle they privilege their discussions with the Communist Workers Organisation, who for years have constituted an opposing pole which the ICC can treat as a moon reflecting the light radiating from themselves considered as a sun, as a glorious fountainhead, streaming forth the beautitudes of class consciousness. They also privelege the circle of "sympathisers and readers". This is the principle domain within which the ICC seek to mobilise support against the "parasites" who, composed of Ex-ICC members, constitute another belt around the ICC. This circular thinking, having been established in the self-conception of the ICC, must inevitably reproduce itself internally. Internal debate requires different viewpoints. Around each viewpoint there must coalesce those who see the correctness of that viewpoint. As the defenders of the correct viewpoint vis-a-vis their misguided comrades, they must in turn view themselves as the party within the party, a circle within a circle.
The ICC calls for the defense of revolutionary organisation. This can only start, for them, when they shuffle off the coils of Bolshevism, liberate themselves from mindnumbing concentration of circles. The "party spirit" is merely the "circle spirit" writ large - larger than life. With the party, we are lead to believe, the circle gains an infinite radius, the circular arc is transformed into a straight line. This is the metaphysics of Newtons calculus where finite magnitudes undergo a magical transformation into infinite magnitudes in order to realise a qualitive change. This is the metaphysics of the rising bourgeoisie of the Royal Society. This is the metaphysics promulgated by Freemasonry. This is the metaphyiscs attacked by Anton Pannekoek in Lenin as Philosopher. This is the sterile metaphysics of the ICC.
With their repeated calls for centralisation they echo the seventeenth century Newtonian clergy who used gravity as the centralising principle manifesting God, and thereby underwriting a social stability centred around the whiggish ideal of a constitutional monarchy. The Newtonians, grouped around the Royal Society, attacked such pantheistic materialists as John Toland, who saw gravity as an innate property of matter, and used this as a basis to call for a republic free from clerical influence and religious intolerance. "In Toland's cosmology the downgrading of the immaterial principle ruling the behaviour of supposedly inert atoms corresponded to the downgrading, indeed the removal of king and clergy." (Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy, Brian Easlea 1980)
For the ICC consciousness radiates out from the party, whose "spirit" is "a continuity of organisational principles and experience" which must be transmitted from generation to generation - i.e. a 'apostolic' tradition forever seeking to penetrate and 'fertilise' the inert mass of the proletariat. This is idealism run riot, the same idealism that appears in Lenin's theory of the 'party' injecting class consciousness into the mass. In reproducing the Newtonian metaphysics which animated the Royal Society, is it any wonder that they then attract elements with a more openly masonic programme?

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New Atlantis
The Future lies Open
What is to be Done?

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