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Violence, Opportunism and Ideology

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Where you speak from is Ideology. Where I speak from is Ideology. That much is clear. There is nothing outside of ideology. Often, when we talk of violence, we ask questions of 'means' and 'ends'. Questions of the 'rationale' of activist protests often involve an analysis of whether violence is merely the means to an end or an end in itself. What we need to understand is that any value judgment about violence is not outside an ideological worldview. 'Humane-ness', 'pacificism', and even 'disarmament' are ideological in nature. Disarmament rhetoric of theorists like Kautsky belies their inherent opportunism, according to Lenin. Cries for disarmament and a pacifist politics instantly excludes one from being a socialist, according to him.
I am doing some research on political caricature about China in the contemporary US press, and expectedly, most of the themes are on the violent aggression of China's growth, and the US skepticism of the Chinese missile strength. The same politics that allows US to hoard, stock and sell nuclear arsenals, cries for 'civilian' uses of nuclear technology from the rest of the world. US-laid sanctions related to nuclear weapons uses much the same kind of 'disarmament' jargon; that only a specialized armed militia's violence is justified.

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Opportunism is a system that the proletarian revolution must target itself at, as Lenin says; any revolution that aims at the destruction of imperialism without targeting the opportunism of the social-chauvinists is doomed to fail. That is because the petty-bourgeois social opportunists are transitory players who seemingly have a stake in the welfare of the proletariat; but when the bourgeois moves to crush resistance from the working class, it attaches itself firmly to the bourgeois, by using terms like 'disarmament.'

In our discussions of communism in this class, we have had reservations about the theory because of our inability to see what the future of a communist society looks like. We prattle on about being 'wary' about such iron-fisted regimes where people will be mere economic slaves, without reading Marx's conception well. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx clearly highlights WHAT a communist society would look like, in as much as he can predict it. The theory of dialectic materialism does not allow him to build utopias. That is not the point of the theory. An understanding of the fact that we live in ideology may help us from making such sweeping statements without really getting down to understanding what Marx is saying.

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